Whilst the Mozilla project does not provide downloads for Firefox or Thunderbird for the Raspberry Pi that does not mean you can’t install them! The trick is knowing what the unbranded Open Source versions of these applications are called, these versions are available in the repositories of most Linux distributions including Raspbian (Jessie).
The Firefox browser gets renamed Iceweasel and the Thunderbird mail client gets renamed Icedove, so once you know this installing them is quite straight forward. Obviously you need to be running either the MATE of XFCE desktop.
Update Current Packages
Before downloading and installing anything we need to be running as root and it is a good idea to make sure that your system is up to date.
$ su Password:
OR
$ sudo -i Password:
# apt-get update;apt-get upgrade
# apt-get update;apt-get upgrade
Get:1 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org jessie InRelease [15.0 kB]
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Fetched 9130 kB in 39s (234 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
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Installing Firefox
The current version of Iceweasel is 31.8 which corresponds to the last extended support release (ESR) of Firefox.
Note – Unfortunately since support for Adobe Flash depends on a browser plugin that requires an x86 processor it isn’t available on the Raspberry Pi.
To keep the number of installed packages to a minimum I’ve chosen not to install the recommended packages.
# apt-get install iceweasel --no-install-recommends
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libevent-2.0-5
Suggested packages:
fonts-stix otf-stix fonts-oflb-asana-math
fonts-mathjax mozplugger libgnomeui-0
The following NEW packages will be installed:
iceweasel libevent-2.0-5
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 30.2 MB of archives.
After this operation, 69.3 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
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One installed you can start it from the application menu. It is going to seem a little slower than on a desktop PC, particularly when starting up, but given the small size and low power of the Raspberry Pi it works surprisingly well.