I can’t for the life of me find the answer to this one
If I download a program. Firefox 19 in this example and uncompress in my home directory, I can’t run it.
Firefox is executable and running the cmd prompt just runs firefox 18.
This also happens with peazip portable
I’m assuming it’s a sending somewhere but I can’t track it down
Sounds a lot like you just don’t have the program in your PATH. When you type “firefox” into the command line, it searches the directories in your PATH to find an executable to run. So for example, most paths include /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, etc. Unless “.” is in your path, it won’t execute files in the current directory.
So what you can do is, if you’re in that directory, type “./firefox” to execute the local binary instead of what’s in /usr/bin.
Then again, is installing Firefox inside your home directory actually what you want? Or do you want to install it to replace the earlier version of Firefox? In the latter case you’ll need the .deb package (use Muon or Synaptic to make things easy), not the .zip file from the Mozilla website.
Yeah never try to install apps “the windows way”
always wait for the official package to appear.