1750618 - Make background updates work when running the background update task at Windows log-in

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Application Update, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

We have reports that the background update task fails when run at log-in. The following is from Matrix:

Has anyone tried getting the background auto-update feature work on Windows by setting the task to run at log-on? That would be a great QoL enhancement to get a fresh Nightly build always first thing when opening the computer without the need for unnecessary restarts. I just have not had any success with getting it to work reliably. Chromium browsers (chrome, edge) have update tasks that run at log-on. I have not seen anything suspicious in logs either, except for the fact that even though the background update feature would successfully download the update seems like it isnt passed on to the mozilla background update service as seen from the absence of mozilla background service installation logs during the time. I wonder if it relies on some feature that isnt initialized early enough at startup/login? From this use case I also get some bits "mozilla update job" stragglers that are not cleaned up that can be seen with "bitsadmin /list" in command line.

Be aware that :bytesized countered:

Personally, I'm a bit nervous about running the updater right at startup. Some people will have Firefox start right at startup, and we could end up with some unpleasant race conditions if we regularly try to run the updater almost exactly the same time. Chrome doesn't really have to worry about this because, on Windows, they have versioned install directories. So updating can't screw up an already-running installation. But Firefox doesn't have versioned install directories and updating Firefox while it is running can cause problems.

This ticket tracks trying to understand what's happening in this scenario, and if possible, making it work -- accepting that we probably don't want to do this by default.