Closed Bug 1854326 Opened 1 year ago Closed 1 year ago

Firefox update in background asking mandatory restart

Categories

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Firefox 117
defect

Tracking

()

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: coolgada, Unassigned, NeedInfo)

Details

Attachments

(1 file)

Attached image Firefox Screenshot.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/117.0

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Do some online payment
  2. click URL within site to navigate or initiate a payment which redirect you to payment gateway site
  3. after it is successful and in case firefox is updated in background, and payment gateway redirect back to parent site, get below message

Above happened again while navigating a website and suddenly an message

Actual results:

  1. Got an meesage (screenshot attached)
    "Restart to keep using firefox
    An update to Firefox started in background. You'll need to ...
    "
  2. I am not sure if my parent site got the confirmation if payment was successfully.
  3. Had to wait couple of days for them to knew about this.

Expected results:

It should just show toaster message that restart to Firefox is required, instead of blocking access

OS: Unspecified → All
Hardware: Unspecified → All

This isn't a remotely exploitable security vulnerability so I'm clearing the security flag.

The warning shows when Firefox cannot start a content process to render the website you're accessing (because the running version of Firefox no longer matches the version of Firefox that's on disk), it's not a question of "blocking" you from doing something just because Firefox feels like it.

Were you running multiple copies of Firefox, and/or did you run the updater or installer in the background, or are you in a multi-user environment (where someone else could have done this) ?

Group: firefox-core-security
Component: Untriaged → DOM: Navigation
Flags: needinfo?(coolgada)
Product: Firefox → Core

I only have single copy of Firefox and no multi-user environment.
I experienced this scenario twice with me. One was when payment gateway was redirecting back to parent site and I got that message which worried me if transaction got completed or not.

By blocking I mean it gives that message and then mandatory I have to restart the browser.

"The warning shows when Firefox cannot start a content process to render the website you're accessing (because the running version of Firefox no longer matches the version of Firefox that's on disk)"
Instead of directly updating it background, you can download it but show a toaster message that Firefox needs to be closed for updating or update it when Firefox is closed, won't that be a good user experience?

Flags: needinfo?(coolgada)

(In reply to Ketan Gada from comment #2)

I only have single copy of Firefox and no multi-user environment.
I experienced this scenario twice with me. One was when payment gateway was redirecting back to parent site and I got that message which worried me if transaction got completed or not.

By blocking I mean it gives that message and then mandatory I have to restart the browser.

The warning shows when Firefox cannot start a content process to render the website you're accessing (because the running version of Firefox no longer matches the version of Firefox that's on disk)

Instead of directly updating it background, you can download it but show a toaster message that Firefox needs to be closed for updating or update it when Firefox is closed,

That is already what Firefox is supposed to do. Something else (e.g. an external software/package manager, a backup process that is restoring old files to their original location, another user on the same machine, or another running Firefox instance, or ...) is doing the overwriting which is causing this error to appear. To figure out what is going on here we'll need to work out what that thing is on your machine. I'll move this to app update as the folks there are more likely to know the answer to this.

(for context for nika/gcp: I initially moved to DOM navigation because I wonder if with fission there's something we can do better here around process reuse given the outline of what happened in comment 0. Perhaps that'd need to be a separate bug...)

Component: DOM: Navigation → Application Update
Flags: needinfo?(bytesized)
Product: Core → Toolkit

I have a few questions:

Do you use multiple Firefox profiles? Is this computer managed by your employer, school, or some other organization? How did you install Firefox? Does this happen regularly, or just the one time?

Flags: needinfo?(bytesized) → needinfo?(coolgada)

No Multiple profiles, computer managed by employer. I installed through exe. Happened twice

Flags: needinfo?(coolgada)

(In reply to Ketan Gada from comment #5)

No Multiple profiles, computer managed by employer. I installed through exe. Happened twice

So far, every time that I have heard of this problem happening on a computer managed by an employer, it has been because the employer has installed some piece of software that updates Firefox while it is running. Can you please ask if your employer uses any software like this?

Flags: needinfo?(coolgada)

Never got a response from this user. We can reopen this bug if they respond.

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 1 year ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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