1431722 - An update is available but no update is available (Firefox 58b16)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20171226003912

Steps to reproduce:

I'm running Firefox 58 beta 16. It says an update is available.

I go to "https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-beta-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US" and it offers me to download the same Firefox version which I'm already running.

Please fix.

Also, https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-beta-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US redirects to http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/58.0b16/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-58.0b16.tar.bz2 which looks like a huge security issue in my book.

Comment 1

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Also here https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json

Comment 2

[Molly Howell (she/her) (mostly inactive)]

(In reply to Artem S. Tashkinov from comment #0)
> I'm running Firefox 58 beta 16. It says an update is available.

Can you clarify where exactly you're seeing that an update is available? Currently 58 beta 16 is the latest beta version, but there have been 58.0 release candidates built, and I think those get pushed to at least some beta users.

> Also,
> https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-beta-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-
> US redirects to
> http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/58.0b16/linux-x86_64/en-
> US/firefox-58.0b16.tar.bz2 which looks like a huge security issue in my book.

If you mean the HTTPS-to-HTTP redirection, that's being addressed in bug 1422844.

Comment 3

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Attachment: Update available

The Help -> About dialog says an update is available.

This is for the official Firefox 58 beta 16 release.

Comment 4

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

If there are RCs as _beta_ builds, I guess they must be made available via https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-beta-latest&os=linux64&lang=en-US or though your ftp server, but I only see https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/candidates/58.0-candidates/ - and those builds are from the release channel, so if I upgrade to them, I will no longer be at the beta update channel.

Comment 5

[Molly Howell (she/her) (mostly inactive)]

Okay, thank you for the screenshot.

The message you're getting means that the update service tried and failed to write to a file in the Firefox directory. That is, of course, a prerequisite for being able to apply an update, so it hasn't even tried, and instead fallen back to showing the manual download link. The download link is correct for release and wrong for beta (there should be a /beta at the end of it), but that's a separate problem (which I can't find an existing bug for, so I'll file that and link it here).

Have you been able to successfully apply updates to this installation in the past? Usually on Linux this problem is caused by a permission error, so it could simply be that the user running Firefox doesn't have write permissions on its directory (a reasonable configuration for security reasons, but it does break our updater on Linux).

Comment 6

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

I prefer to update manually for security reasons: under Windows you offer a separate service which updates a Firefox installation under the SYSTEM user (so the user has no write access to Firefox' installation), while under Linux automatic updates can only be performed by the user himself and I just cannot subscribe to that. That's why I wrote a script which basically acts as a Windows service ( https://tiny.cc/firefox-updater ).

Comment 7

[Molly Howell (she/her) (mostly inactive)]

Okay, what that leaves us with is the wrong fallback URL in the about dialog (I filed bug 1432310 for that), but everything else behaving as expected. I think that means there's nothing else we can do here; I don't see a solution aside from adding support in your script for candidate builds.

Comment 8

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

How is this bug invalid when Firefox says there's an update available but there's no place on Earth to get it officially?

Comment 9

[Molly Howell (she/her) (mostly inactive)]

I explained exactly why. The update client is behaving as expected. The official way to get this update is to allow our updater to install it. We cannot provide specific support for every custom method that anyone might be using to install updates.

In this case, you can approximate what the updater would have done by installing all the files from the release candidate except for defaults/pref/channel-prefs.js, or by replacing the channel name in that file with "beta".

Please do not reopen this bug again.