I have heard a lot of people complaining about firefox 3 being the default installation in the latest release of Ubuntu. I have been happily using firefox 2 with all of my extensions still functioning as they had before the upgrade to Hardy Heron 8.04.  I concider myself a heavy firefox extension user with 10 MUST HAVE extensions and a few that I could live with or without.  With that many dependancies and firefox 3 being so far from it's official release, I have no choise but to keep using firefox 2.

  I have found that when I try to uninstall firefox 3 it will also uninstall liferea feed reader and songbird so I need to have both firefox 3 and firefox 2 installed together. Having both installed at the same time causes some conflicts, so I have found a way to have the two co-exist on my installation of hardy heron.

  Firefox 2 is still in the repositories, and if you upgraded from gutsy (7.10) then you probably already have firefox 2 installed.  The first thing you need to do is open up synaptic and scroll down to firefox.  You will see that there is a ' firefox-2 and a firefox-3. If they are both installed you can just change your prefered browser from 'firefox' to 'firefox-2'.  You can do this by going to System>>Preferences>>Prefered Applications.  Firefox 3 now uses 'firefox' and firefox 2 now uses 'firefox-2'.  So if you have any shortcuts to firefox, you will have to change those to 'firefox-2' as well.  If you end up starting firefox 3 by accident and try to go back to firefox-2, you will find that it will not funtion properly.  The only I have found to fix this is to remove the hidded ".mozilla" folder in your home directory.  Once you delete this folder, all of your firefox settings and extensions will be gone.  I have a way to fix this but it requires some setup.

  I am not against using firefox 3 and I look forward to it's official release, but until my extensions are all supported, I am just not ready to go there yet.

  One of the extensions I can't live without is FEBE (Firefox Extension Backup Extension).  This comes in very handy if firefox 3 messes up your settings folder.  This extension will make a backup of all of your extensions.  You can also backup your full profile with this utility.  I normally do both so that I can install my extensions one by one or make a full backup and restore of my profile. 

  First you need to create a folder called 'Firefox Backup' or whatever you like.  Then run firefox profile manager from the command line by typing

firefox-2 -P

   Create a profile and select a name for your new profile. Exit the profile manager when you are done and then start firefox-2 again and install the FEBE extension.  Restart firefox and then setup FEBE with the directory you created earlier (Firefox Backup).  Once you have your firefox settings setup you can just go to 'Tools>FEBE>Perform Backup'. Once you have made a backup you can schedule certain intervals to run FEBE.  To restore your profile you can go to 'Tools>FEBE>Restore>Restore Profile', select the profile file and then select the firefox profile to apply it to.  FEBE will not allow you to restore a profile to a currently running user.  If you deleted your settings (.mozilla) folder that includes your profiles, you will need to use the profile manager again to create a second profile to restore your settings to.

  I hope this is not to confusing for anyone.

  If the FEBE extension is something you need, you should also check out CLEO.