Getting back on the web when you lose your browser
Computer failures usually don’t happen often, but when they do, most people don’t know how to fix them. This happened to my mom a few months back; she was doing a Mac OS X update when she had a power failure. The updater was updating her browser at the time, so when the power came back on and she rebooted her system, she didn’t have a browser. Without a browser, there was no way to download it again.
There were two solutions to this problem: rerun the patcher, or get her back on the internet temporarily until I can physically look at the system since screen sharing wasn’t working either.
Mac OS X and Windows both have ftp capabilities built into their operating systems. That means you don’t need a third party application to access an ftp site. What users may not know is how to get to these sites to download a browser when they need it.
For this example, we’re going to download Firefox, but I’ll add the URI for Opera at the end of the article. The path names will be different on both, though. This is more of an exercise in understanding how FTP works than getting the latest copy of Firefox.
To date, there’s no way to download Google Chrome from Google’s own site via ftp. Even though there are third party sites that allow you to do that, I won’t be posting URIs for software that doesn’t come directly from the company itself.
Mac OS X
In the Finder, on the menu bar, select the “Go” menu, and then “Connect to server…”. You will see a window asking where you want to connect to.
If you like, you can open the Terminal application, located in Applications->Utilities, and use ftp from there.
Windows
Did you know that you can open a URL from any Windows Explorer window? Simply type the URL into the text edit window and Windows will open that location for you.
Alternatively, you can open the Command Prompt application, located in the Accessories menu, and use from from there.
Once you’ve decided which way you want to connect to the ftp server, you need to know the URL of the location you’re connecting to.
For the Mac’s “Connect to Server” window, and the Windows Explorer window, type in:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
If you’re using the command line option, type in:
ftp ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
Unfortunately, Mozilla doesn’t have a “latest” folder, so you’ll have to find the folder of the latest current release. As of this writing, the latest version is 3.6, so you would navigate to that folder (for command line, type “cd 3.6″).
Inside this folder you’ll find the releases for the different operating systems. Windows users can cd to “win32″, Mac users can cd to “mac”.
Windows command line users would want to type “dir” for a directory listing, Mac users would type in “ls -l”.
Inside this folder are the localized folders for all the supported languages. You can cd to the language you prefer. For English U.S., cd to en-US.
You made it! You found the location of the installer. If you’re using the UI ftp interface on Mac or Windows, you can simply drag the installer to where you want it to be copied to. For command-line users, type “get <filename>”.
Once the installer is copied to your hard drive, you can run the installer and Firefox should launch. If you were only missing your browser binary application, and if Firefox wasn’t already your default browser, Firefox should be able to import your bookmarks from whatever was your default browser.
If you have a thumb drive or a CD burner, it may be a good idea to back up the Firefox installer onto that so if you lose your browser again, you can reinstall Firefox.
Opera:
ftp.opera.com/pub/opera
Category: How-Tos
