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How can you configure Firefox to apply updates as soon as they are available?

  • 5 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 28 views
  • Last reply by ideato

andyblackard
andyblackard
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I have a mandate to update Firefox across every machine in my enterprise within 48 hours of a new release. I have been doing this with intranet distribution tools (SCCM, etc.) but because of the frequency of Firefox updates this has become laborious.

I've been looking at the about:config settings in the "app.update" category (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Preferences) and some of those seem promising. As a test, I set "app.update.silent" to TRUE and "app.update.interval" to 60 (seconds) on a legacy version of Firefox. I restarted the browser, let it sit for a few minutes then restarted it again expecting the latest update to apply, but nothing happened.

How can I script or automate via Firefox's internal settings the same update process that is triggered when users manually go to Help > About?

I have a mandate to update Firefox across every machine in my enterprise within 48 hours of a new release. I have been doing this with intranet distribution tools (SCCM, etc.) but because of the frequency of Firefox updates this has become laborious. I've been looking at the about:config settings in the "app.update" category (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Preferences) and some of those seem promising. As a test, I set "app.update.silent" to TRUE and "app.update.interval" to 60 (seconds) on a legacy version of Firefox. I restarted the browser, let it sit for a few minutes then restarted it again expecting the latest update to apply, but nothing happened. How can I script or automate via Firefox's internal settings the same update process that is triggered when users manually go to Help > About?

Modified by andyblackard

All Replies (5)

philipp
philipp
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hello andy, you might also want to check those two values:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/App.update.download.backgroundInterval http://kb.mozillazine.org/App.update.idletime

andyblackard
andyblackard Question owner
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App.update.download.backgroundInterval was a good suggestion. Idletime won't have an effect since I have app.update.silent enabled.

However I'm still not seeing the desired effect. Currently I have the following configured:

app.update.silent = true

app.update.download.backgroundInterval = 1

app.update.enabled = true

Any other thoughts?

Modified by andyblackard

philipp
philipp
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hmm, this seems to be trickier than anticipated - after a little bit of experimenting i can't find a quick way to reliably do that :-/

maybe some one else can come up with different ideas?!

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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The Nightly versions have these values for some of the prefs because they can be updated daily more than once because of a respin

  • app.update.interval : 7200
  • app.update.promptWaitTime : 43200

You may need to reset update timer prefs.

  • app.update.lastUpdateTime.background-update-timer

You can have a look at the comments in the source code that handles the updating process to see if that gives some ideas.

Modified by cor-el

ideato
ideato
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app.update.mode = 0 (download all updates without any prompt) maybe ?

default is 1 (download all updates only if there are no incompatibilities with enabled extensions, prompt otherwise)

http://kb.mozillazine.org/App.update.mode

thank you