Firefox 3 requires GTK+-2.10 or higher

And so the dependency hobgoblins come out of the woodwork casting demoniacal enchantments, "Gtk [... tap], Cairo, Pango, Atk, [... poof], pkg-config, glib2, fontconfig, [... alakazam], freetype, expat, libxml2, [... whammo], libxslt, python."

If firefox3 tantalizes, then navigating to BLFS 6.3-rc2 will be necessary to get the potions.

If rebuilding, then this order might be attempted:
pkg-config
cairo
expat
libxml2
libxslt
python
freetype
fontconfig
glib-2
atk
pango
gtk+-2

Oh yea, shut down X Windows to do these builds from the console as it may clobber the running X programs and maybe visa versa.

Then, of course, download firefox3 to some location like /usr/local/firefox-downloaded/firefox-3.0.1 and unpack the tarball. I usually chmod -R 777 chrome components extensions. Then set a symbolic link to firefox:
su
cd /usr/bin
ln -sf /usr/local/firefox-downloaded/firefox-3.0.1/firefox/firefox firefox

If I happen not to like firefox3, I would set the link back to the way I have it now:
su
cd /usr/bin
ln -sf /usr/local/firefox-downloaded/firefox-1.5.0.11/firefox/firefox firefox

Note that these downloaded firefoxes all seem to require libstdc++.so.5 which can be installed according to the instructions for gcc-3.3.6 in the BLFS book and you can delete the /opt/gcc-3.3.6 if you just needed the library.

I just reread firefox (3) system requirements:

Firefox will not run at all without the following libraries or packages:

* GTK+ 2.10 or higher
* GLib 2.12 or higher
* Pango 1.14 or higher
* X.Org 1.0 or higher

Since "X.Org 1.0" probably means Xorg-7 and I have Xorg-6.9.0, I'll just forget this until later. I'm already able to be confused enough without the gremlins playing name games with the xorg version. They started saying "Xorg server 1" sometime after xorg7 was introduced.

Per X.org, "The 7.0 version is built from the same source code as the 6.9 so it contains the same additional hardware support, functional enhancements and bug fixes; however, it has been split into logical modules ...". My suspicion is that it was to be called "X.Org 1.0 or higher" (sometimes) only if it was installed as the version 7. I would be pleasantly surprised if mozilla happens to allow leeway on that.

I tried it and it worked ... sort of. But now there are messages "Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path". Things somehow don't look quite right. Possibly, I should had unistalled all of that stuff before installing the new? Anyway, I don't care for firefox 3. The address bar drop down (for previous addresses) has way too much information overload.
Restoring from rsync snapshot.