Alright, it's been a while since I tried any of this "Linux" stuff outside of the PS3, and to be honest, I didn't tinker with the PS3 that much.
So I have Ubuntu 9.04 on my PC now, and all the hardware is installed and working (the only separate install I needed was the ATi driver, which surprisingly went without a hitch. Wasn't THAT long ago that you couldn't say that). I gave Wubi a shot and "poof" there was my 20GB partition image, and starting up set it up right away. It was neat to watch.
But Ubuntu 9.04 only comes with Firefox 3.0.x - and running the system update only got me to 3.0.14. How would I upgrade to 3.5? My only "serious" *nix experience is on a Mac, and I could just drag an app to the /Applications folder and be done with it. I have a feeling that it's not quite that simple on Ubuntu, though I suppose I could be wrong.
I've kind of looked around, but I've been careful not to change anything because I like to keep my computer, you know, booting and at least functional. My /usr/bin folder has something called "firefox-3.0" but the icon just looks like a piece of paper with a gear icon on it, rather than the actual gear icons that are littered throughout the folder. I can't be sure but I think it's a shortcut/alias/link to the actual Firefox app.
I went about it another way, instead, and downloaded the Linux version of Firefox from Mozilla's site and extracted it. Now what do I do with it? I would prefer to not just have apps sitting on my desktop; I'd rather find a way to add them to the applications menu.
edit: just for kicks, I double-clicked the "firefox" item in the extracted archive (for now sitting on my desktop) and it says "this is an executable text file" (?!) and regardless of what I tell it (run, run in terminal, whatever) nothing happens. Same thing with double-clicking the firefox-bin file.