I'm a relatively new Suse 9.0 user and have been learning things here and there. I've used the web broswer icon in the taskbar and so far I've switched it to mozilla simply by replacing the epiphany command with the mozilla one. SImple enough. I've downloaded the new firefox, and can run it from the terminal by logging into ~/firefox and doing ./firefox-bin, but I'm wondering how to make it a "known application" so I can run it from the web broswer icon just by running firefox-bin, the way the icon runs mozilla just by running mozilla %u... anyone know how to do this?

If you right click on the taskbar you should be able to have an option to create a new launcher. Then just link it to run FireFox and the firefox icons are in the directory for firefox also. Hopefully this helps. This is my first attempt at helping someone here :-)
If not i'm sure someone else can help.

Looks like tims1979 beat me to it, but here is a little more verbose explaination if you need it:

Right click where you want to create the button in the menu bar. Select Add-->Special Button-->Non-KDE Application. Browse to the Firefox executable. Select it. If you want a different icon image, click on the button and it will let you browse other icons. Click OK. Bask in the glory of new icon button.