1697365 - In a multiple profile context all profiles say "is updated by another instance"

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect, P3)

Description

[Nobs Wolf]

Attachment: ffupdate.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:86.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/86.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open menu ...

Help / About Firefox

... to get info about pending updates.

Actual results:

All profiles say:

"Firefox is being updated by another instance"

Expected results:

At least one instance should actually tell about updates; better: all instances like this was the case in earlier versions.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Startup and Profile System' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 2

[Adam Gashlin (he/him) [:agashlin] (ex-moco)]

Hi, thanks for the report! We might be able to figure this out with an update log for each of these instances. Please do the following steps to enable update logging:

1. Type about:config into the URL bar
2. Search for app.update.log
3. Toggle its value to true using the ⇌ button
4. Open the Browser Console (Control+Shift+J, or Hamburger Menu -> Web Developer -> Browser Console)
5. In the Filter textbox at the top, enter AUS:SVC to filter out everything except the update messages

Then attempt to update by opening Help -> About Firefox, select and copy the resulting messages out of the Browser Console into this bug (you can either paste it into a comment between two ``` lines, or attach a file). Please do this for each of the instances. Also please indicate what order the instances were opened in, and what order the update checks were done in.

Comment 3

[Adam Gashlin (he/him) [:agashlin] (ex-moco)]

Actually, I'm sorry, this is expected behavior. There are new protections in place (bug 1553982) to prevent an update from occurring when multiple instances are running, because that can easily lead to one instance updating while another one is still running, causing crashes. Unfortunately the message in the About dialog doesn't really refer to this situation so this can be confusing. I'm not sure exactly what the rules are around when an update can be checked for in this multi-instance situation.

Comment 4

[Nobs Wolf]

Then I propose a bugfix to the bugfix (bug 1553982) ;-)

The multi-instance should be protected against "uneven" updates, but not against checking whether there are updates available.

And change the notice in the About-box to something like:

"Update available. Please run a single instance to update."

Comment 5

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Set release status flags based on info from the regressing bug 1553982

Comment 7

[Sven]

Hello, Chrome is capable of applying an update if multiple instances (profiles) are running. It would be really nice if Firefox could do this, too 🙂

The dialog should at least display if there is an update available because currently I have to close one instance to even be able to perform the update check.

Thank you very much!

Comment 8

[Jacques]

I concur. This is a serious bug, because firefox will never been be updated for those who use several profiles. This leads to security issues.
Not only firefox will not be updated, but the users will also not even been aware that there is a new update.

I therefore question the current severity ranking S3. Yes, a workaround exist, but an unsatisfatory one. I do not think it's realistic for users who use several profiles to periodically think about this issue, close all the instances, reopen only 1, and check for update. (In my testing, closing all instances except 1 will actually keep the instance in a loop on "checking for updates", hence why I say it all needs to be closed first).

I would suggest moving the severity to S2, as this is a high-impact issue (security risk by preventing updated), for which there is no satisfactory workaround.

Comment 9

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

(In reply to Jacques from comment #8)

I concur. This is a serious bug, because firefox will never been be updated for those who use several profiles

This is not accurate. Firefox attempts to avoid updating in this state because that is known to cause Bug 1480452. But we don't want to let this situation prevent updating altogether. So after 6 hours by default, Firefox will go ahead and start the update process despite the other instance.

Comment 10

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

In fact, rereading comment 3, it is unclear to me why this bug remains open.

Once we have addressed Bug 1480452 we can get rid of this mechanism. But in the meantime, we want the updater to behave like this in order to mitigate that bug.