Troubles with installing Firefox 21 from the tar archive on linux

Question

I wanted to have a recent firefox instead of the old Iceweasel on my debian linux distro, so I did:
- removed Iceweasel unsing APT
- downloaded the .tar.bz2 archive and extracted it in /user/lib. This created a firefox folder in /user/lib.
- created a link with
# ln -s /user/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
When I tried to run firfox from bash I got
"XPCOMGlueLoadError for file /usr/lib/firefox/libxpcom.so"
Searching a little I saw that in /user/lib/firefox
#ldd libpxpcom.so
give me the missing dependencies: there were two: libxul.so and libmozalloc,so
For the first, I did, in /user/lib
# ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner/libxul.so libxul.so
But libmozalloc.so is in the xulrunner and firefox folders, and doing a link with
# ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner/libmozalloc.so libmozalloc.so
just change the error message, which is now
"XPCOMGlueLoadError for file /usr/lib/firefox/libxpcom.so:
/usr/lib/firefox/libxpcom.so: undefined symbol: NS_DebugBreak_P
Couldn't load XPCOM."
Thanks for any suggestion on how to setup this.

Answer 1

Hm? here's something interesting. In my profile directory, I found a file called 'pluginreg.dat'. It contained this data:
Generated File. Do not edit.<br />
<br />
<pre><nowiki>[HEADER]
Version:0.15:$
Arch:x86-gcc3:$
[PLUGINS]
[INVALID]
/home/neil/Downloads/firefox/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-wmp.so:$
1267896942000:$
/home/neil/Downloads/firefox/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-rm.so:$
1267896942000:$
/home/neil/Downloads/firefox/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-dvx.so:$
1267896942000:$
/home/neil/Downloads/firefox/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer.so:$
1267896943000:$
/home/neil/Downloads/firefox/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-qt.so:$
1267896942000:$
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-rm.so:$
1267896942000:$
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.26/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so:$
1304498979000:$
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer.so:$
1267896943000:$
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-qt.so:$
1267896942000:$
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-wmp.so:$
1267896942000:$
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/gecko-mediaplayer-dvx.so:$
1267896942000:$
/usr/lib/flashplugin-nonfree/libflashplayer.so:$
1309501243000:$</nowiki></pre>
Does this mean that it knows where they are, but does not consider them valid?