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.

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.)

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.