Personally, I keep the ESR-package installed, which means the .desktop-file and icon and such continue to be in their correct places, and then I just override t

Personally, I keep the ESR-package installed, which means the .desktop-file and icon and such continue to be in their correct places, and then I just override the firefox-command via the PATH. So, in steps: 1. Download the tar.bz2 off of Mozilla's webpage. 2. Unpack it into a directory where you want to keep it. Make sure your user has write permissions to that directory, otherwise the auto-updater won't work. 3) In your PATH, place a file with name "firefox" and content: #!/bin/bash /path/to/where/you/unpacked/firefox/firefox "$@" 4) Make that file that you just put into your PATH executable (chmod +x /path/on/your/PATH/firefox). (I'm actually not on Debian, for me it's rather that I replace Firefox Stable with Firefox Nightly, but I don't think this makes a difference.)