Firefox restarting problem

Question

I'm using Firefox 3.0.13 in Ubuntu 8.10 and I have a problem that it suddenly disables the back, forward, refresh, stop options. After updating Firefox using following commands

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install firefox

it always asks me to restart the browser due to a new version being found. How do I fix it? How do I reinstall properly?

Answer 1

sudo apt-get remove firefox; sudo apt-get install firefox will remove the existing version and re-install - but it will leave configuration files intact.

sudo apt-get purge firefox; sudo apt-get install firefox will purge the existing version (ie, remove the binaries and the configuration files - but I'm not sure it will clean up your ~/.firefox, you may have to remove that by hand) and then re-install.

If all you want to do is force a fresh install, sudo apt-get reinstall firefox will do that for you.