Red Hat recently decided that they would jump from Firefox 3.6.26 (which is pretty long in the tooth) straight to the 10.x series: the relevant packages are therefore available automatically to proper Red Hat Enterprise Server users.

It takes a while, of course, for ‘official’ Red Hat packages to make their way onto Centos and Scientific Linux repositories -but Centos got them anyway on or about February 25th (they’re in the updates repository) and Scientific Linux has had them in the fastbugs repository since about the same time.

For Scientific Linux 6.2 x86_64, therefore, here’s what you do to get the latest Firefox (all done as root, of course):

• nano /etc/yum.repos.d/sl-other.repo
• set enabled=1 for the sl-fastbugs repository
• yum update firefox

That should trigger a 33MB-or-thereabouts download, after which you should be set to go.  Personally, I’d then edit the repo file once more and put the enabled back to ’0′ so that you don’t keep being bombarded with suggestions for new updates to things.

Bear in mind that, eventually, the Firefox packages will make it into ‘standard’ repositories (potentially, within days), so this approach is only if you are truly impatient (like me!) and want the latest Firefox right now.