Firefox updated from ESR to retail even though group policy settings disable update
I look after about 20 PCs. All Windows 10. All were running Firefox ESR ranging from 115 - 128. As I get time I update each to the latest 128.x. Using group policies I've disabled all update settings.
However, on two of the PCs, they have updated to v139.0.1. Both of the users swear they did not manually do any update. I can't figure out how they got downgraded to the retail channel.
So my question is, since 128 < 139 how can I get them back on to the ESR channel, without loosing history, bookmarks, passwords and saved logins? I gather FF's installer will detect 128 as an older version and throw an error?
ESR -> Retail to me is a downgrade. So is it possible then to upgrade back to 128.11.x?
Each PC is refreshed annually and the only backup of the profile folder I have is from the last refresh, which in most cases in 8-9 months old.
Is there any way to find out why the downgrade happened when group policy forbids it, and the user did not manually download and install the latest version?
When these downgrades happen they break things. For example, when one PC was downgraded to retail his outlook.com email no longer works. If he uses his laptop which is on 128.11.0 it works fine.
All Replies (3)
I know of no way that could happen without the user explicitly doing it. Those ESR releases update on a completely different update channel, so 139 isn't made available to them.
That being said, you should be able to downgrade.
You can set the environment variable MOZ_ALLOW_DOWNGRADE=1 and then you won't get the error when you start Firefox 128 with a Firefox 139 profile.
You can also start Firefox 128 with --allow-downgrade.
It's possible there might be some issues - I don't know if there were internal database changes between 128 and 139, but you should get bookmarks and the like back.,
It does certainly seem strange, and if it only happened once, I'd suspect the user was not being totally honest. But on two different PC... bizarre. Could some other software have triggered the installation of the retail version?
With all the GPO settings set to disable updates it should not have installed any version, let alone swapping from esr to retail.
Ah well, I guess I could be searching for answers forever.
I'll see if I can find some documentation on the environment variable and --allow-downgrade. If anything at all doesn't work properly, I'll never hear the end of it.
I see that 140esr is less than 2 weeks away... I wonder if waiting for that then installing that over the retail version might work? Then I don't have to worry about "downgrade" issues? What do you think?
Modified by citizen1138x
That's probably what I would do. ESR140 comes out next week.
Here the docs on the profile download
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/understanding-depth-profile-installation
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