macOS non-admin users get repeated requests to install update
Categories
(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: mozilla-jrk, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:101.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/101.0
Steps to reproduce:
Use firefox as a non-admin (Standard) macOS user when firefox has a new update to install.
Actual results:
When the non-admin user is prompted to download the update, and the user dismisses the prompt because they do not have admin rights to do an install, firefox repeats the prompt every few hours until the administrator updates firefox.
Expected results:
One of two things should happen:
- The non-admin user is prompted once to download and install the update. Once they dismiss the request, that user should not be prompted again until an even newer version of firefox is available.
- Firefox should check for admin rights and only prompt administrators to install the update. (It would be ok to nag an admin, since they can do an install.)
If Firefox cannot determine admin rights, then the "download" prompt should have an option "Not an admin" which would then stop firefox from repeatedly asking to download the update.
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Comment 1•4 years ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Toolkit::Application Update' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Comment 2•4 years ago
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Hello, and thank you for filing a bug.
I'm afraid that we aren't going to change this behavior. The current behavior is by-design. There are a number of reasons why we want it to work this way:
- The Firefox updater has the capability to ask for the administrator credentials that it needs to update. It is not uncommon that a non-administrator can get someone with an administrator account to give them permission to update Firefox.
- Once permission has been given once, the updater will do some configuration so that it doesn't have to get administrator permission to update in the future. In other words, you should only have to grant it administrator permissions once.
- It's not that uncommon to use a standard account for daily use and only use the administrator account when necessary. If we never asked users with standard accounts to update, Firefox would never be updated for these users. Given that Firefox is expected to safely run untrusted and often malicious code on a daily basis, this would be a huge security risk.
- We expect that many computers with multiple users fall into one of these two categories: Either (a) the administrator will promptly keep software up-to-date, in which case standard users shouldn't see prompts to update, or (b) the administrator does not frequently use the computer or does not keep Firefox up-to-date, meaning that the standard users need to actively seek out administrator permission if Firefox is ever going to be updated.
- On the Firefox Release channel, we don't show the restart-to-update doorhanger notification until an update has been downloaded and waiting to be installed for 8 days. If the administrator is regularly installing updates, this should give them plenty of opportunity to do so.
Side note: If you are administering computers for others, you may want to look into using Enterprise Policies to do so.
Description
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