335541 - Non-administrator users should be notified if a Firefox update is available

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 318855

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[Sebastian Lisken]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2

This probably a dup of bug 303595 with some of bug 309367 thrown in. But as the important remark is the last of several comments of a bug marked as "future" last August, I hope you agree it merits repeating.

Here is the story: The automatic update system under Windows does not do anything if people surf under an account with user rights, thus cannot write to the install directory. Of course this is recommended safe surfing behaviour. Users are not even notified about the updates. I spent about a fortnight not being aware of the 1.5.0.2 update because of this.

Help > Check for Updates is disabled, and paradoxically, Tools > Options > Advanced > Update > "Automatically check for updates to" > Firefox is disabled but checked. Unchecked would be closer to the actual behaviour.

The desired behaviour should probably be an alert saying "An update to Firefox is available. Run Firefox as an adminstrator to install it." or such.

In bug 317703 there are comments saying that guest users should not be bothered with anything even remotely connected to administration. While I want to stay out of the argument whether update management should be a system-wide setting rather than account- or even profile-wide, I think that a dialog with just a confirmation button and a suggestion to let an administrator run Firefox should be OK.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use Firefox on an account that does not have update rights (I guess write access to the install directory is relevant)
2. Wait until a Firefox update is available on the automatic update service.


Actual Results:  
The update is only shown once a privileged user runs Firefox for a while (it took me about 15 minutes until the notification came up).

Expected Results:  
A dialog should alert the non-privileged user that an update should be installed and that a privileged user needs to run Firefox to receive it.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 318855 ***