832370 - About Firefox > “Check for Updates” really means “Install software on my computer with no warning or undo.”

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Michael Zajac]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/536.26.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.2 Safari/536.26.17

Steps to reproduce:

In the About Firefox dialogue, clicked “Check for Updates,” an action billed as *getting information*, not *irrevocably installing software on my computer*.


Actual results:

Firefox downloaded and installed the latest version without any prior warning.


Expected results:

Firefox should have *checked for updates*, informed me of the results, and offered to download and install any available.

Alternatively, the button label should indicate the action about to be performed (download and install software on my computer).

Comment 1

[(mostly gone) XtC4UaLL [:xtc4uall]]

You want to Change the Update Settings in Options/Advanced/Update.

Comment 2

[Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA]]

It's in the users' best interest to update their browser to the latest version. That's why the default option is to update automatically when selecting the about dialog. You can change that, though, through the options from comment 1.

Comment 3

[Firefox User]

(In reply to Virgil Dicu [:virgil] [QA] from comment #2)
> It's in the users' best interest to update their browser to the latest
> version. That's why the default option is to update automatically when
> selecting the about dialog. You can change that, though, through the options
> from comment 1.

The behavior of "Check for updates" can not be changed in Options->Advanced->Update, or it is broken. Mine is set to check but ask to download & install. Doing "Check for updates" automatically downloads and installs.

Also, it is not always in the best interest of the user to update to the latest version because the "latest version" doesn't guarantee better. For example, version 27 introduced bugs that didn't exist in version 26, which affect usability. Relating to the behavior of "Check for updates", how is a user supposed to check and see if version 28 is out, without having version 27 force-installed on their system if not?