My system had firefox v1.0, and it kept crashing, so I decided to upgrade to new firefox v2. I had no idea how to do this, so I just unzipped the tarball and replaced the original folder with the new one.

Now, whenever I open firefox from the GUI, it kinda goes "starting firefox" down the bottom, and it just goes away (like Firefox tends to do from experience, but it usually loads sooner or later, but not this time).

But anyway, now I'm stuck without a browser...

Btw I heard there's supposed to be an install script, but I couldn't find one in the directory.

What distribution are you running?

try launching the new install from a command line:
Exaple: Lets suppose you untarred the tar ball under /opt, cd to /opt/firefox and then type ./firefox
This should work, since the firefox binary is self contained within the install dir. If this works then you should symlink /usr/bin/firefox to this location.

that doesnt work. gives me some error about shared something...

when I get back on there I can copy the error message

I'm running ubuntu 5.1

yea I wanted to upgrade to 7 but it won't let me - the version is too old to be supported by app update. But that's a different problem

anyway the error when running firefox from the terminal is:

error while loading shared libraries, libs tdc++.so.5 cannot load shared libraries no such directory exists

any idea?