384801 - messy auto-update as non-privileged user

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 383518

(Toolkit :: Application Update, defect)

Description

[bjoern]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-DK; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.4-8 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-DK; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.4-8 Firefox/2.0.0.4

When Firefox is installed as Administrator and a non-privileged user did not explicitly deactivate auto-update, Firefox will download updates and try to install that over and over again.
See also http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2905942.
As the non-privileged user does not have the permissions to do that update it will complain again and again that it did not work. Even when the Administrator did the update (in this case from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4) the user gets the notification that updates have not been successful. There is no obvious way to fix this for the user.

The auto-update must become more intelligent:

- when the admin actually did an update the firefox sessions of non-admin users should see that and throw away their downloaded updates

Or much better than that:

- never let it come to such a situation and don't let non-privileged users try to update a "system-whide" installation. Updates should only be tried for installations users did on their own (in their home directory...)

- when auto-update is enabled by a non-privileged user but the installation is a system-whide installation it would be nice if there would just pop up a message that the administrator or a user with appropriate permissions should run an update.



Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Carsten Book [:Tomcat]]

since this bug is reported against windows xp its a dupe of Bug 383518

Comment 2

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

I verified that Firefox on Linux is not hit by bug 383518.