What happens when you run it from the cmd line? Download a tarball from Mozilla, unzip it, run "firefox-bin", and see if it works.

not sure how to run it from command line, have not found any list of commands in the limited reading i have managed and did not notice any such action in the help sections i have seen that you guys provided, also not an exhaustive effort.

Just open the cmd prompt and type firefox &

the command you provided seemed to kick start the program, although the image i provided does not look good to me.

Looks like you may need to install appmenu-gtk-module. see screenshot of what I have installed. Here's a search on the issue. You will need to ping your fellow ubuntu users on the forum to see what they have installed. I'm sure someone here is also running it and can chime in. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+install+appmenu+gtk+module

I also get a lines when running from the cmd line(rarely need to), but not as much yours.  ;-)) see screenshot

i would also suggest running Firefox from Mozilla along side your distro version using sync to have your data in 2 browsers. see old screenshot Just in case one goes boom, you can still access your data. I run several versions and Waterfox.

Download Firefox from Mozilla, run firefox-bin from the folder and see if you have the same issue. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-release

Just double click this. see screenshot