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Disable silent updates of Firefox on Ubuntu

  • 4 replies
  • 0 have this problem
  • 7 views
  • Last reply by James

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I want to stop Firefox from silently updating in the background during browsing sessions. When it finishes updating like this, currently open tabs stop working and I can no longer open new tabs. The only fix is to restart Firefox. This is a problem if I am, for instance, going through a set of web forms as the information I enter will then be deleted and I have to start again.

When I have used Firefox on Windows, the requirement to restart Firefox to install updates has always been indicated by some change to the settings button on the top right of the window. With Ubuntu, the update is downloaded and installed without any action from my part, and given that it is quite disruptive this is unacceptable.

I have tried a number of ways of changing this, none of which work. Under the general settings tab, there are no options for changing the way updates are handled. Settings under about:config appear to do nothing. I have app.update.auto set to false, and app.update.notifyDuringDownload is set to true. I have attempted to circumvent these by setting a policy using the policies.json:

{

 "policies": {
   "DisableAppUpdate": true,
   "AppAutoUpdate": false,
   "BackgroundAppUpdate": false
 }

}

None of these have made the slightest change to how Firefox handles updates.

I am running Firefox 110.0.1 (64 bit) on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, but I should point out that this has been a problem for the last several years of Firefox versions on the same OS.

I want to stop Firefox from silently updating in the background during browsing sessions. When it finishes updating like this, currently open tabs stop working and I can no longer open new tabs. The only fix is to restart Firefox. This is a problem if I am, for instance, going through a set of web forms as the information I enter will then be deleted and I have to start again. When I have used Firefox on Windows, the requirement to restart Firefox to install updates has always been indicated by some change to the settings button on the top right of the window. With Ubuntu, the update is downloaded and installed without any action from my part, and given that it is quite disruptive this is unacceptable. I have tried a number of ways of changing this, none of which work. Under the general settings tab, there are no options for changing the way updates are handled. Settings under about:config appear to do nothing. I have app.update.auto set to false, and app.update.notifyDuringDownload is set to true. I have attempted to circumvent these by setting a policy using the policies.json: { "policies": { "DisableAppUpdate": true, "AppAutoUpdate": false, "BackgroundAppUpdate": false } } None of these have made the slightest change to how Firefox handles updates. I am running Firefox 110.0.1 (64 bit) on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS, but I should point out that this has been a problem for the last several years of Firefox versions on the same OS.

All Replies (4)

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Hi

Are you using the Snap or tarball from Mozilla, or are you using the distro version provided by the Ubuntu community?

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I'm using the distro version installed through apt

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If you use the Firefox version from the Ubuntu repositories then Ubuntu software management control the updating and you can't affect this from within Firefox.

You can try Firefox from the official Mozilla server if you currently use a version from the repositories of your Linux distribution to have more control.

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ryan.j.thomas1 said

I have tried a number of ways of changing this, none of which work. Under the general settings tab, there are no options for changing the way updates are handled. Settings under about:config appear to do nothing. I have app.update.auto set to false, and app.update.notifyDuringDownload is set to true. I have attempted to circumvent these by setting a policy using the policies.json

These methods are only for the official builds from Mozilla like say https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/#product-desktop-release

Third party builds like those you built from source yourself or package builds in Linux distros do not get software updates from Mozilla.