Firefox forcibly updates itself after disabling auto-updates

Firefox Development
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Somewhere in the last couple of months Firefox on Linux has picked up a “feature” that is somewhere between extremely grating and unacceptable, at least in its current form: forced auto-updating.

The problem with it is that it auto-updates in the most ham-fisted way possible: while I’m using the damn browser, in the middle of my work, it’ll just randomly auto-update.

What makes this worse is that I cannot count on Firefox’s data integrity, I’ve had more occasions of data loss due to a Firefox update than I care to remember. The main reason I don’t file a bug report for that is that if I do, the bug report will just gather dust and die rather than being picked up i.e. it’d be wasted effort on my part.

Now, I’ve read about the app.update.autosetting in about:config. I set that to false, and for a while all seemed well. Except I had a system update for Firefox (new major version that I explicitly chose not to install yet), Firefox just “randomly” crashed, and when I reopened it, the system update was gone and Firefox still updated itself.

This last part is not only undesirable but 100% unacceptable. If I say I don’t want to install an update, behaving like Microsoft and shoving it down my throat anyway is a surefire way to lose users. Right now I’m at the edge, a browser that doesn’t serve me is a browser I don’t need. That’s why I dumped IE and Chrome, after all.

And normally I’d chalk this up to just a bug, but Mozilla has been moving in a dubious direction lately, it’s noticeable in Firefox, and not in a good way either.

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Hi Joey, do you install Firefox directly from Mozilla or through your distro’s package manager?

There seems to be a lack of communication between Firefox’s internal updater and some package manager updaters that leads to unpredictable updates. Or should I say, package managers used to effectively disable Firefox’s built-in updating and recently it has stopped working in some distros.

I do not follow the details on that. If you want to keep using your distro’s build of Firefox, please check with them on whether this is a known issue and has a solution.

For the build directly from Mozilla, use the Preferences page to change update behavior. The about:config setting is obsolete on Windows and may be obsolete on other platforms.

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It’s installed by Ubuntu’s package manager, so now I’m thinking Canonical are the ones that integrated FF in a sub-par manner. I guess I’ll try installing FF from the website and work with that if it isn’t too visually jarring - the part Canonical got right in their integration is the GUI theming as the default gnome theme is beyond hideous.

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I use Debian… I was wondering where my ‘pay as you go’ internet data is going to… (i’m on a slow connection that is paid by MB’s used). This behavior is TOTALLY not expected or appreciated, especially when I think that I DECIDE WHEN I WANT TO UPDATE SOFTWARE ON MY COMPUTER. Debian: I’ll change my OS. Firefox: I’m gone.