I find it incredibly disruptive every time this page comes up and it’s never completely capable of restoring my tabs. Is there any way to disable it so that it will instead update when I choose to restart Firefox?
it only appears on linux if you update your browser while it’s running.
iirc existing tabs usually just keep working but you cannot reload or open new ones until a full browser restart.
Updating anything with stuff running is a bad idea. Yeah, yeah, I know all about the cases where this works, but I’ve spent too much time fixing it when it doesn’t.
If Firefox is using its own updater then it will notify that update is available and can even download it while it’s running. But the updater doesn’t normally apply the update (i.e. replace the program files on disk) until you restart Firefox so you can dismiss the update notification (not the one pictured in op) no worries.
But if some other updater mechanism such as package manager is handling the updates then you can run into issues if it’s stupid enough to replace the files while Firefox is running.
I’ve never had any issues with tabs not restoring (I have 6729 tabs currently open, on the newest FF release, updated many times). What do you mean by “never completely capable of restoring my tabs”?
I may have misworded it a bit. The tabs themselves get restored, but the state of the tabs (being logged in to a site, for example) isn’t always retained. In all fairness this is perhaps due to my privacy settings, but I’d prefer it if Firefox didn’t force me to restart.
I’m guessing they mean that state on the page is lost. Because that absolutely happens. I’ve never lost a tab and I usually have dozens if not hundreds of tabs open.
Hamburger menu -> Settings -> General -> "Firefox Updates" -> "check for updates but let you choose to install them"
As for losing open tabs, there're a few different extensions that'll allow you to bookmark all open tabs and throw 'em in a folder. Easy enough to do that before updating, then just delete the folder that's created via the bookmarks manager once you've updated/reopened tabs.
I got bookmarks going back a decade, sometimes I try to visit a random one and find that it no longer exists and I don’t remember what it was or why I saved it
When you mentioned it I remembered that of course there is a setting for this… but when I went to check it just says “Updates disabled by your organisation” In this case it’s a work laptop that has a bunch of “security” things installed on it which prevent me from doing things like …installing applications I need to do my job. Not sure how Firefox is able to update when it’s been explicitly disabled, but I will at least change this setting on my personal computer.
In that case the issue is likely that files on disk are being modified by whatever mechanism your IT uses to push updates to devices. If the program files are modified while Firefox is running then you will unavoidably get this prompt.
I suppose the best you can do is to ask your IT folks to not update programs that are currently running.
I have the same issue but I feel the main problem is not this page but the fact that the tabs are lost. I’ve been using FF for so long and I keep losing tabs on updates. It’s really frustrating.
You can enable saving the tabs when closing Firefox. I use Firefox like this since a decade or so. Open Settings > General > Startup and check option “Open previous windows and tabs” (its the first top most option on that page).
You can also open the Menu > History > “Recently Closed Windows” and probably open the last window this way? I don’t know if this works after an update. But in the History menu could also be an option “Restore Previous Session”, when a session is available (maybe after an update??).
Honestly, I don’t know why Firefox does not ask to reload tabs, after restart of an update. I think it’s an oversight.
I see. I am using Firefox like this for years and it works for me and I thought it would for everyone else by just enabling the option.
As said, you could also look into the History menu to restore last session or closed window. And if all of this does not work for you, either look into an alternative plugin (should be the last option in my opinion) or simply save all open tabs in a temporary bookmarks folder before restart / update. Such a manual solution is always ugly, but if nothing else helps…
When this happens, Firefox has been updated in the background & the non-updated parts that’re loaded into memory attempted to load one of the updated parts & found that they were no longer compatible, causing this message to appear.
At this point you HAVE to restart Firefox in order to be able to use it, no way around it. Soooo very fun on Mac & Linux since both can update in the background. It’s also possible to have this happen on Windows, but it’s far more rare as it seems to require having multiple different instances running at once.
On Linux at least, if you install through the package manager, it’ll only update when you update the rest of your packages. And you can be completely in control of when that happens.
On my work Mac, I just update manually. The menu icon tells me when a new version is available, so I update within a day or two of that popping up.
On Linux at least, if you install through the package manager, it’ll only update when you update the rest of your packages. And you can be completely in control of when that happens.
Damn, computers have gotten really far if nowadays we’re happily throwing away the performance of dockerizing ˜everything on entirely normal application installs. Sigh.
When I finally got tired of them crashing my browser at random times I took the time to stop them.
You can change the addresses that it uses to check for updates in the about:config. To be sure though I put all of those addresses and IP’s in the hosts file to make sure there could be no contact. Now my firefox updates when I update my machine. Some of them may not be mozilla specific but all of them are blocked by me.
I got this list by using a squid proxy on a VM to log all addresses firefox connected to and watching the logs as firefox ran with no sites loaded over a two week period.
You can use the list below to search for keys in the about:config to change. Or you can just put these in your hosts file.
I think detectportal.firefox.com is used to detect if the current Wi-Fi connection requires the user to log in on a portal page, like the public Wi-Fi at airports or cafés. It redirects you to the log in page. Why would you block that?
Yeah I think so but I didn’t care. I blocked them all since I don’t have a portal at my house. The point was to block their access to my machine. My trust is at all time low for most of these companies.
Weird. I’ve never seen that on my Macs. I always have to click on “About Firefox” to check for and download any updates so it only updates when I do that.
At least MacOS is more Unix-like. So yes, in nearly everything important to a Linux user except CLI-UX (Command line interface user experience, nice word lol) Mac is worse than Windows somewhat, but as I would see the CLI-UX as one of the most important things (in my workflow, which is based on Linux tho), Max would be better than Windows. But of course, both are trash.
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