Firefox 120 to Firefox 141 Web Browser Benchmarks

Firefox has the worst update process. Idk how they haven’t figured this out yet, but the fact that I regularly get “restart to finish update and continue browsing” when opening new tabs or links is totally unacceptable. Also the fact that it can’t just update in the background and still requires me to manually accept a UAC prompt is crazy. Especially bec sometimes if you don’t accept the prompt… you can’t open Firefox until you allow it to finish updating. So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.

I find it's worse with Chromium than Firefox. After an update, new tabs don't load properly and links fail, until I manually restart it. In the past I've joined Google Meet meetings in Chromium and found the audio not working because I'd forgotten to restart the browser since the last update.

It’s just few minutes of update time. If one is so short of time, perhaps they need to re-evaluate other things.

I've only ever seen this happen with the Linux package-manager-type process where the update might happen "underneath" the browser without its knowledge. Using their built-in upgrade system as far as I know it just happens only on browser restart... but I guess I haven't used it on Windows in a long time.

The issue isn’t time, it’s that I’m in the middle of working, I have unsaved work that I can’t save now bec the browser decided to update in the background.

Interesting: On MacOS, with the option "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" chosen in the Firefox preferences, the experience is exactly that, update in the background without further notifications. That is, I get a prompt that an update is available and whether I want to download it now or not. If so, it starts a download in the background and applies the update on the next start of the program. (You can also check for updates and restart in the "About" dialog.)

(Note: I've set new tabs and windows to open with a blank view, which may also make a difference, as there is no default content.)

I don't think I have ever run into it on Windows, but I have seen it pretty much every time I update it on Linux through the package manager.

>So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.

Similar to most programs, you can change certain behaviors in the settings of the program. For Firefox update behavior:

Settings -> General -> Firefox Updates -> "Check for updates but let you choose when to install them".

Or, you can choose "Automatically install updates" and subsequently check "When Firefox is not running".

Either way should address your issue.

I've seen something similar in Windows corporate environments where Firefox is updated while you are using it, and the only indication that it has happened is that Firefox insists on restarting before you can load any more pages, although no UAC prompts were involved. It is annoying, especially if you are in the middle of submitting a form. I don't know whether to blame it on how IT has chosen to implement centralized updates, or on Firefox for not being as easy to centrally manage as other software, or some combination.

Then it sounds like Firefox has the "restart page" to mitigate this exact edge case. Better than having undefined behavior like that imo.

As I get it from other comments, this is not a problem with the built-in updater (as on Windows). On linux, when updating via package manager, you should now this can be an issue with any program. Yes, most programs survive running while being updated, but for a complicated piece of software (like a browser) this behavior is understandable.

See the Arch wiki for updating on Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Restart_...

Sounds like a nothing burger. Firefox allows you to restore tabs. And you can turn off automatic updates. Seriously don’t understand where you are facing this issue. Every commercial grade software allows you to customise your workflow.

You can restore the URLs but you don't get page state, that draft you couldn't save because Firefox suddenly stopped loading new pages? Completely gone.

The point is that this is poor default user experience, and it should not be this way.

It's specifically a Linux ecosystem problem they're talking about. The package managers don't coordinate with Firefox and just change files out from under it. That means that you can end up with the processes Firefox spawns when a tab is opened not matching the main process. This caused problems often enough that Firefox implemented a mechanism to detect this case and tell you to restart the browser.

I guessed so. (Which is why I brought up the behavior on that other OS.)

This is on a corporate PC, I don’t run into this issue with chrome (which I try to avoid using in general) whose update schedule is also managed by a corp IT policy.

Those settings don’t do anything bec even when I select “Check but don’t install” it still nags me and eventually installs even if corp IT policy is only to update monthly.

I wish there was a way to turn off the nagging too. Why can’t Firefox trust my corp IT to follow their process?

I moved to just using Firefox's binary tarball sitting in my home directory, so it uses its own update process, which doesn't have this problem.

I've seen tab restoration fail after those automatic updates, and even when the tabs do restore that doesn't mean that the actual state is preserved. Work is interrupted, and it's a burger full of crap when it happens.

That's why I always update my browsers manually.

Never faced a tab restoration failure. I have used ff in Linux, Mac OS, windows. Managing updates, or page states, or tabs, never had an issue. And never felt needed special extensions to manage anything.

This definitely look like an issue with your own setup. But If you did face issues, you can always file a bug.

> I wish there was a way to turn off the nagging too. Why can’t Firefox trust my corp IT to follow their process?

That is definitely possible. In my corporate environment, I don't get any nags or prompts to update, and when I go into settings it shows "Updates disabled by your organization".

It sounds like your IT left the update prompts enabled, perhaps specifically to let you update at your own convenience and hence avoid the problem you complain about when it forces an update while you are using it.

I just got it on my Windows, but haven been postponing updates for ages before that with zero issue. Hence I was quite surprised. I'm almost certain what triggered it was some application trying to load a website.

Not sure which technique the application used, but after few seconds it loaded the error message, and after that I couldn't open new tabs or windows without getting that error.

Browsers aren't the only software that could be broken by auto updates on Linux and you can set up exactly the same behavior in at least APT's unattended-upgrades (dunno about RPM).

On linux I use kill -9 before any update, on the parent of ff's entire process tree. Works for me every single time, reliably getting my tabs back without the need for any extension.

On old and now obsolete systems this is maybe 20 seconds? I invoke the package manager to update just ff. It downloads, gets extracted, then I'm restarting it. It does it's thing, and restores my tabs. After killing it with -9 right before the update.