403385 - Automatic software update should be a machine setting, not a user setting

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 383518

(Toolkit :: Application Update, enhancement)

Description

[Peter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9

We use Firefox in a corporate environment where users have very few privileges on their PCs. Among other things, this means that they do not have write access to the folder structure in which Firefox is installed. This conflicts with the automatic upgrade procedure leading to a message "could not complete the update" coming up.

We are aware that there is a per user setting that we can manipulate to alter this behavior, but because of the rather random manner in which user preference folders are named and because we haven't become aware of the problem until recently, it will be very cumbersome to correct the setting in each user's preferences.

Apart from the write access problem, we would like to be able to decide when Firefox is updated by distributing new versions as we deem it necessary.

It would be nice if there was a machine setting that would override any user setting that pertains to automatic software updates and for that matter one that disables the user's ability to change the setting in the Options dialog.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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