1856916 - Firefox updates without my permission

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[[:nickname]]

Attachment: Clipboard01.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/118.0

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox on Windows 10 LTSC.

Set to "Check for updates but let you choose to install them". Use Firefox.

Actual results:

Firefox downloads and installs updates whenever it wants. It does not ask for permission first.

Worse, once they're installed firefox stops working. I get a "You must restart firefox to continue". Which means I now lose all of my state (because I don't store cookies), and have to spend 5 minutes going through all the login faff for my sites.

This has happened twice now. Last week I thought maybe I'd accidentally clicked the "Download" button and forgotten, but twice in a row?

Expected results:

Firefox should ask me for permission and not install until I tell it to. Like it used to.

Comment 1

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

Is your computer managed by your employer, school, or another organization?

Please also provide update logs:

1. Navigate to about:config.
2. Set app.update.log to true.
3. Open the Browser Console either with the hotkey Control+Shift+J (Command+Shift+J on macOS), or via Hamburger Menu->More Tools->Browser Console
4. In the Filter textbox at the top, enter AUS: to filter out everything except the update messages.
5. Navigate to the "Update" section of about:preferences. It should automatically check for an update.
6. Once the update check has completed, copy the messages out of the Browser Console and attach them to this bug.
7. Navigate to about:support
8. Find the "Update Folder" entry and click "Open Folder".
9. Locate the file updates.xml and attach it to this bug.
10. Open the updates directory.
11. Inside, you should find files named last-update.log and backup-update.log. Attach both of these files to this bug.

Comment 2

[[:nickname]]

Attachment: updates.xml

Comment 3

[[:nickname]]

Attachment: backup-update.log

Comment 4

[[:nickname]]

Attachment: last-update.log

Comment 5

[[:nickname]]

I manage it myself.

Browser console entries:

15:50:52.326 AUS:SVC End of UpdateService status
15:52:12.651 AUS:AUM AppUpdater:check - currentState=STATE_IDLE
15:52:12.651 AUS:AUM AppUpdater:check - this.aus.isOtherInstanceHandlingUpdates

Comment 6

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

Unfortunately, most of the information that we need to determine what is going on here is not included in these logs. What we really need are the browser console logs that show the problem happening. Could you please leave app.update.log on and, if this happens again, perform these two steps before restarting the browser so that I can take a look at those logs?

3. Open the Browser Console either with the hotkey Control+Shift+J (Command+Shift+J on macOS), or via Hamburger Menu->More Tools->Browser Console
4. In the Filter textbox at the top, enter AUS: to filter out everything except the update messages.

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Tangentially, this is not the first time that troubleshooting a problem has resulted in an issue like this with the desired logs not being available since the update has already happened. I just filed Bug 1857058 to do something to address this issue.

Comment 7

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Clearing stale NI.