1976529 - Restart required screen not shown when multiple profiles are open

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

I'm still working on creating steps to reproduce. Starting with an observation from QA:

"while testing, we noticed that updating Firefox is no longer possible when two or more profiles are open...Could you please confirm whether Firefox can now only be updated when a single profile is open?"

The nightly update is delayed if multiple instances are open. Information to help with testing this from :bytesized:

" You can turn the entire feature off by setting app.update.checkOnlyInstance.enabled to false. Or you can change the delay before we install the update anyways by setting app.update.checkOnlyInstance.timeout to some number of milliseconds. The default appears to be 6 hours."

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please) from comment #0)

Steps:

1. In yesterday's nightly[1], use the multiple profiles feature to launch multiple profiles at once
2. In the about Nightly window, click the button to check for updates
3. Relaunch one of the open profiles--this should apply the update
4. In the non-updated profiles, try to open a new link

Can you be more specific about this step 4? How are you opening a new link? Are you opening a new tab?

Comment 2

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Yes, it was opening a new tab--I recall clicking a zoom calendar link and having it open a new tab and insert a google.com?url=mozilla.zoom.com... link in the URLBar, but didn't otherwise respond.

I'm trying to reproduce now using a stale nightly.

Comment 3

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

I'm not able to reproduce right now, so likely to just close this as incomplete, but will poke at it some more today.

I've tried setting app.update.checkOnlyInstance.interval to 100, to force the checks to run more frequently, but I still can't get into a situation where one profile in a group has completed the update and others have not.

After installing a stale nightly from 5 July, if I have multiple profiles open, I do see one unexpected thing: clicking the "restart to apply update" button in the about nightly window doesn't do anything--it triggers a restart, but the version has not updated, and the "restart to apply update" button is shown in the dialog after the restart. Asking :bytesized in slack whether this is expected behavior or not--perhaps this is what QA was noticing.

Comment 4

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

actually didn't mean to close it quite so soon

Comment 5

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

These are the steps I followed when the "Nightly is being updated by another instance" message appeared with two profiles open (tested on Windows 11):

1. Installed an older version of Nightly 142 - I installed the build from July 1st.
2. Opened the old Profile Manager and created a new profile named - test.
3. In Profile Manager, I checked the box for "Work offline" and started Nightly.
4. Went to about:preferences#general and in the Nightly updates section, selected "Check for updates but let you choose to install them."
5. Create switchable profile named Profile 1.
6. Create switchable profile named Profile 2.
7. Closed all the Nightly windows.
8. Reopened Nightly, and from the Profile selector clicked on Profile 1.
9. From the Hamburger Menu - opened Profile 2.
10. For both profiles, opened the About Nightly dialog from the Help menu.

Expected results: One of the dialogs should show the "Update to the latest Nightly" button - allowing the user to Update.

Actual results: Both dialogs show the "Nightly is being updated by another instance" message. If I close one of the profiles and reopen the About dialog in the remaining one, I see the Update button.
However, if I then close the dialog and open the other profile again, the Update button is missing from both profiles. Please see the screen recording here.

I could reproduce the above issue also when setting the preference app.update.checkOnlyInstance.timeout to 100 on each of the profiles after being opened.

When setting the app.update.checkOnlyInstance.enabled preference to false in both profiles:

• Profile 1 shows the "Update and Restart" button.
• Profile 2 still shows the "Nightly is being updated by another instance" message — which I believe is the expected behavior.
  After clicking Update and Restart in Profile 1, the update is applied.
  However, Profile 2 still shows the "Nightly is being updated by another instance" message — I expected it to show the Restart button instead.

Comment 6

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Is comment 5 a known issue in the updater code?

Comment 7

[Robin Steuber (she/her) [:bytesized]]

That looks like the expected behavior to me.

Comment 8

[Jared Hirsch [:jhirsch] (he/him) (Needinfo please)]

Thanks for your thorough testing, :sbadau. I think this bug can be closed since this seems to be the expected update behavior.