1715125 - When a profile downgrade is detected attempt to check for updates

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Application Update, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

If we detect the user starting Firefox with an older version of Firefox than was previously used with the current profile we currently just refuse to continue unless the user creates a new profile. In most cases that is reasonable, the profile was probably run with a different install of Firefox on the machine. An exception is when the user's profile is on a network drive and so they may have last used it on a machine that had updated when the current hasn't.

When detecting a profile downgrade instead of bailing out immediately it would be useful to first trigger an app update check and attempt to upgrade to a Firefox that can use the profile.

Comment 1

[Jobst Schmalenbach]

(Reporter of bug 1714904)

The solution you suggest would be all that is needed, indeed!

All bug 1714904 needs is a dialog box giving the user an EXTRA choice to UPDATE Firefox, then restart and use the existing profile that was 'updated' while using a HIGHER version of Firefox on ANOTHER machine.

That would be wonderful and solve the one and only problem I have with Firefox.
My users are quite happy to use Firefox - I explain to them why we really need an alternative - but this is a little frustrating to them.

Comment 2

[Robin Steuber (they/them) [:bytesized]]

This might be doable, but it would probably be quite tricky. The updater usually loads once we have a profile. Aside from not being able to access the user's prefs, there may be other consequences to attempting to load the updater without the profile loaded. I'll put it on my TODO list to look into this further.