1496388 - broken auto-update in windows domains hurts firefox adoption

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[leonardo.canducci]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0

Steps to reproduce:

Get auto-update working in firefox when users and computers are part of a windows domain (proxy authentication problem?)

Also try to install firefox with the stub installer (given the proper permissions).


Actual results:

Auto-update fails. Stub installer fails.


Expected results:

Firefox auto-updates to the latest release version. Stub installer installs Firefox.

Comment 1

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

The stub installer does not support proxy authentication because it doesn't have a way to prompt for the credentials (bug 799861).

But app update should be working. What aspect of it is not working for you? Do you never receive prompts to install new updates at all? Do you get error messages? Something else? Thanks.

Comment 2

[leonardo.canducci]

Actually auto-update did work on a recent Firefox install (62.something) even though when selecting menu|help|about Firefox the updater seemed to stall (it continued to show "checking for updates..." for more than 10 minutes but when restarted it installed the update).

Unfortunately auto-update didn't work on older Firefox installs (52 and back). In my particular case that's unfortunate because  PCs are cloned from an old install with outdated software (I know...) and while chrome manges to auto-update itself Firefox can't. So my choices are: use chrome or reinstall Firefox on every single PC (or of course build a new up-to-date PC as a template for cloning).

Anyway it looks like this issue was specific to our particular setup so I'd mark it as closed.

Thanks for helping.

Comment 3

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

That's interesting. I can't recall anything that changed since 52 that would have affected how we check for and/or download updates (in terms of network/HTTP that is). But anyway there's not much I can do at this point about an issue that 52 is having, it's well out of support.

Thanks again for reporting the issue. Closing the bug as requested by reporter.