1751641 - Firefox is forcefully restarted about every 2 weeks

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1705217

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[ocor61]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:96.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/96.0

Steps to reproduce:

I was happily browsing the internet, trying to

• unspam my life and
• enjoy a healthy internet
  with a faster Firefox, because I love the internet and Mozilla's good ideas and the power it gives me...

Actual results:

... when suddenly Firefox reported it had to restart. I could not open a new tab. In every new tab Firefox told me it had to restart. It was like experiencing dreaded Microsoft Windows all over again. This was one of the reasons I left Windows and moved to Linux, thinking I would never have to forcefully restart anything anymore.

Expected results:

What should have happened - obviously! - is that Firefox should have told me it needed to restart and would like to do so at MY earliest convenience. NOT at Firefox's earliest convenience.

I donated to the project. However, I am so p*ssed off right now that I am actively looking for an alternative. Do NOT force people to restart their browser. I cannot believe that this is by design, which is why I filed this as a bug and will again every time this happens, until I am on a new browser that actually does NOT SPAM me with this message.

Comment 1

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Quoting from a similar recent bug

I understand how frustrating this is, but Firefox doesn't install updates of its own until you close or restart the browser.

If you see about:restartrequired when you open a new window, that's because your operating system (Linux) has updated Firefox while you were using it, and at that point it has to be restarted.

You either work around this by installing the official version of Firefox from mozilla.org, which will only notify you about updates or install them when you quit the browser, or change the settings of your system updates to run at a different time (or manually).

Alternative (not a good idea), is to hold updates in your distribution (e.g. for Ubuntu https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PinningHowto#Introduction_to_Holding_Packages).