How can firefox run without installing?
 

Did you guys know that you don't have to install firefox to run it??

I just went to this website:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Downloaded it and it downloaded firefox-3.1b2.tar.bz2 then i used Ark to extract it on my desktop and it made firefox folder, then i opened firefox shell script that i found inside and it launched firefox..

The question is.. how can it be?? Doesn't firefox need to be installed? How about all dependencies and stuff?? This is so weird..

no, that's pretty normal. there aren't many dependencies as firefox is fairly chunky and brings it all along with it. installers just put files in certain places, doesn't change the app at all.

Libraries are available system-wide, and your user can run any binaries he has enough permissions for -> all binaries have access to libraries installed on the system.

Not really installed , you just run it in youŕe own home dir.
It is a rather a old trick

I think Microsoft has gotten a lot of us into this "it has to be installed" mindset, due to their registry system. We don't need that in Linux. There is no registry. Linux packages usually use a .rc file and/or some hidden directory within your login path. With Firefox, you usually have to have the correct version of libstdc installed, but that's about it.

Are you saying that we don't install software on linux?

it all depends what "install" means to you. Applications are integrated into the filesystem and DE menus etc..., so I would call that installation quite comfortably.

To me something is installed if you have to do something more than unpack a compressed file to use it. E.g if it's an rpm or deb package then you have to install it. If there is a script to run that writes files in to various places throughout the file system then you're installing it. If all you're doing is downloading a .tar.gz file and unpacking it then you're not installing it.

I've seen people struggle with the concept that some software doesn't require any sort of installation process before you use it when I've explained it to them.

That pretty much says it all.

It seems to me that "install" means to put the SW somewhere where the system can find it and load it into memory. The only thing that makes it complicated is when said SW also requires a bunch of other files to be installed---what we lovingly call "dependencies".

So FF has minimal dependencies----therefor it's easy to install.

I had totally forgotten the issue of desktop integration when I made my post. If a package only needs to be unpacked to run, then OK, maybe that's a simple installation. :) OTOH, if there needs to be some integration with gnome/kde/whatever then more work needs to be done: both to put it into the menus, and remove it when you uninstall. Maybe we can call this a more complex installation?

Have you ever looked at http://portableapps.com/ ? in this instance the apps are for Windows, but it's still amazing all the applications you can run from a thumb drive with no installation required.

there are several project creeping in to do the same for native Linux apps as well..
http://www.portools.com/

So, you made a successful manual installation... Cool! ;)

Cheers

My thoughts, exactly.

Strapping the app to the core of the OS (like Windows) is just asinine.

Cheers

exactly, in windows, dos and linux/unix (more so in command line applications) there is the path, which is a list of directoreis that is searched for executables when you issue a command that is not internal to the shell, failing that it will give you an error, 'installing' simply means placing the binaries in said path, however many linux applications can be unpacked to a local directory and executed from that directory, 'installing' in linux is mostly for making something globally available to all users.