252737 - Firefox should be able to auto-restart after extension/theme install

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 218947

(Toolkit :: Application Update, enhancement)

Description

[Adam Rice]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040614 Powerdonkey/0.8 (All your Firefox/0.8 are belong to Firesomething)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040614 Powerdonkey/0.8 (All your Firefox/0.8 are belong to Firesomething)

If Firefox is going to insist that I restart my browser, it could at least give
me a helping hand. When it pops up a window saying "Software Installation is
complete. You will have to restart Firefox for changes to take effect.", instead
of just having an "OK" button it should have "Restart now" and "Later, dude"
buttons.

From a technical point of view, this requires Firefox to know its own location
(I think the stubs provide this anyway), and to have some platform-dependant
code to exec() the binary when it would normally call exit(). This could
probably be hacked up quite quickly with a global RestartOnExit flag.

On second thought, maybe the "Later, dude" button should be labelled "Later
(browser may be unstable until manually restarted)". But that could cause
localisation problems.

Since someone is inevitably going to say "well, how long does it take to just
close the window then click the firefox icon again anyway?" I say

a) Humbug! It's the principle of the thing
b) The problem is *when* do you click the icon? If you click it before Firefox
has fully unloaded itself, strange and unpleasant things happen. And no OS I've
used provides un-loading notification.
c) I have to wait an (unknown) amount of time until I'm reasonably sure Firefox
has unloaded, and then wait again while it starts up again. This sucks.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install an extension or theme
2. Exit Firefox
3. Wait until you're reasonable sure it's actually gone
4. Navigate menus/desktop to start Firefox again

Actual Results:  
I thought "this sucks".

Expected Results:  
It should have restarted itself (well, actually, it shouldn't have required a
restart to start with, but since the alternative at the moment seems to be
extremely flakey and unpredictable behaviour, I'll settle for autorestartification).

Comment 1

[Bill Mason]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 218947 ***