Kubuntu 25.10: Self-Updating Firefox

[DinoNerd]

I installed Kubuntu 25.10 a few days ago, and am still learning my way around.

I found the following message from firefox in my notification center:

Update available for Firefox.
Close the application to update now. It
will automatically update in 14 days.

Simple question: how do I tell firefox that I'd prefer to control my own computer, rather than having firefox control it for me?

Related questions: Is this a more general thing on kubuntu, and I can expect a similar message from KDE plasma any time now? Or bash? Or is this just a firefox thing?

It looks as if it's firefox-specific as my software update tab in system settings offers a choice whether to update software manually or automatically, and it's been set to manually since before I got this message.

But I don't see anything about updates in firefox' Settings. (Maybe I missed it - firefox has a lot of stuff here.)

Additional related question: if this can't be turned off, can anyone recommend an alternative web browser that lacks this feature. *sigh*. (If I wanted this sort of behaviour, I'd have installed Windows.)

Edited to add: I found a Firefox Updates section the the General pane of Firefox' settings.

Firefox Updates
Keep Firefox up to date for the best performance, stability, and security.
Version 147.0.2 (64-bit) What’s new
Mozilla Firefox Snap for Ubuntu
canonical-002 - 1.0

The only thing that appeared clickable was the "What's new" phrase, and there were no check-boxes.

This smells like I might be able to fix this by rebuilding firefox from source. Of course then I'd probably never think to update it, but what can you do? Possibly, though, it's an installation option intended to allow a business' system administrators to force upgrades to employee desk tops, in which case I might be able to override it with somewhat less drastic measures.

[claydoh]

It is a Snap thing. Snap packages automatically update, or do so on a schedule.

You can adjust and disable this.

If one wants to roll back an update, this is possible as well.

[DinoNerd]

I think I've got it. Firefox has a hidden page accessed with the faux URL

about:config

There are a number of scary warnings. Insist you know what you are doing, and when you get to the page of apparently undocumented options, search for update.

You'll find an option named

app.update.auto

It will be set to true.

There's a clickable symbol on the same line. I have no clue what it's supposed to represent, but its tooltip says Toggle clicking once will set the value to false. You'll also get an additional clickable symbol, that probably means "reset to default".

There doesn't seem to be a save button, so your change probably takes effect immediately.

Heavens knows whether the update already scheduled will happen regardless, 13 days from now, or whether every ensuing update will unhelpfully reset this setting.

[DinoNerd]

It is a Snap thing. Snap packages automatically update, or do so on a schedule.

You can adjust and disable this.

If one wants to roll back an update, this is possible as well.

Interesting. Snaps are pretty much black magic to me - all I know about them is that they include rather more than a .deb, so they can happily depend on specific library versions you might not have installed.

I guess now I need to figure out how many snaps were installed with the system. (I believe I've entirely avoided adding any myself, so far.)

[claydoh]

Firefox has a hidden page

This only works with a self-contained Firefox "tarball", or a Windows version, not the Snap package or a deb version.
This config option IS set to "true" by Mozilla but the snap and deb packages do not have the self-update mechanism included in the builds.

Ubuntu/Kubuntu use Snap packaging for Firefox and Thunderbird by default.

snap list

This will show installed snaps and their related dependencies.
Discover shows which type, and you can choose between the options when installing if there are multiple ones available.



The 14 day message is mostly if you never shut the browser down ever for two weeks.

See my previous posts to turn off the autoupdate.

[DinoNerd]

I guess I'm not the first person to be unhappy with something about the Firefox snap. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/1399...p-in-ubuntu-22

I'm not sure whether I'm bloody minded enough to actually do this, but I just might.

[DinoNerd]

This only works with a self-contained Firefox "tarball", or a Windows version, not the Snap package or a deb version.
This config option IS set to "true" by Mozilla but the snap and deb packages do not have the self-update mechanism included in the builds.

Rats ;-)

Ubuntu/Kubuntu use Snap packaging for Firefox and Thunderbird by default.

snap list

This will show installed snaps and their related dependencies.

Thank you. Sadly, I see 9 snaps, and most look like important system components. The only one I'm sure I can dispense with is thunderbird; one of my first priorities after installing the distro was to install and configure my preferred email client.

The 14 day message is mostly if you never shut the browser down ever for two weeks.

See my previous posts to turn off the autoupdate.

Realistically, this isn't a biggie. I anticipate doing:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now

more often than every 14 days, though I'm quite unlikely to shut down firefox or reboot the system any more often, unless it proved to be unstable without more frequent reboots. (It's currently at 4 days and counting; no stability or performance issues so far.)

It's just the principle of the thing. Automatic updates are a Windows thing :-)

Also, to be honest, I'm late for a meal, and so cranky.

And yes, I should probably use the App Store rather than the command line, given the existence of things like snaps, which it presumably understands even if I don't. But while this app store is better than the last linux app store I used, it's useless for installing anything resembling a system program or library, unless it's required by an app. IIRC, I had to use the command line to get sshd, and a couple of other things I don't now recall. (Maybe gcc?)

[DinoNerd]

You can adjust and disable this.

If I'm understanding the link correctly, I could disable refreshes indefinitely, and still update anything that's ready for update manually, at the same time as I update my .deb's

[Snowhog]

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now

Substitute sudo apt upgrade with sudo apt full-upgrade. Your system will thank you (well, it won't complain .... later!).

The difference between upgrade and full-upgrade is that full-upgrade removes packages if necessary — i.e., if an upgraded package requires another package to be removed, full-upgrade will remove the offending package, whereas upgrade will ignore the upgrade.
So if keeping up-to-date in all cases is more important than features, apt full-upgrade is better than apt upgrade.

[claydoh]

, I should probably use the App Store rather than the command line,

Personal preference, really. Discover handles multiple types (debs, snaps, flatpak, firmware updates, and KDE Store items), so one needs to use multiple command line tools for managing them otherwise. Apt has nothing to do with snap, and vice versa here, for example.

it's useless for installing anything resembling a system program or library

Yes, it is an app store, not a package manager. There is Synpatic or Apt for that.

[DinoNerd]

Substitute sudo apt upgrade with sudo apt full-upgrade. Your system will thank you (well, it won't complain .... later!).

Thank you. That explains some weirdness I've observed on prior desktops.

[DinoNerd]

Farther discoveries almost 2 months later:

I did not disable snap's forced updates or switch to getting Firefox from a .deb, mostly because I was busy with other things.

But I did I decide to ignore all warnings of the latest forced update to Firefox. It was supposedly going to happen at least 4 hours ago.

My firefox windows are still open, and they are all in the virtual desktop where I left them. Because of the way in which session management is broken in Kubuntu 25.10 (at least using Wayland), that's not possible if Firefox had exited and then been restarted on a later version.

I'm curious whether the update will ever occur, assuming I neither kill Firefox nor reboot the system.

I don't know whether to be happy or angry about this - I dislike receiving inaccurate messages from system software (or anything else), and consider that a somewhat serious bug - but if snap's going to have a bug, I like that it's this particular bug - forced updates not actually happening, after heavens knows how many notifications of the impending denial of service.

[skyfishgoo]

when i get the notification, i just close firefox ... wait for the notification that it's been updated which takes only a few seconds now because it's already downloaded the update in the background... then reopen it.

i'm right back where i was before with all the same open tabs... it's not very disruptive at all and in fact worked the same way when i was on windows.

[Qqmike]

skyfishgoo, yes, same here, exactly, very easy and quick.

[DinoNerd]

i'm right back where i was before with all the same open tabs... it's not very disruptive at all and in fact worked the same way when i was on windows.

I see that both of you are content to have software providers control how and when you use your computer. Clearly objecting to forced updates is not why you left Windows.

I on the other hand am in the process of leaving MacOS because too many of their forced updates make my system harder and harder to use, with less of the functionality I was using still available to me, traded for (in their case) protecting me from using software that didn't get vetted by their app store, making the UI for a system with two 4K monitors better adapted to a 3x4 inch cell phone screen, and, always, gratuitous changes that "refresh" the UI, forcing users to relearn how to do their daily tasks.

I'm curious whether the update will ever occur, assuming I neither kill Firefox nor reboot the system.

I unlocked my screen this morning to find a notification from 1:44 AM "Firefox is updating now!"

So sadly the only bug in this misfeature is that it can't tell time. If the timestamps are accurate, they sent the "updating now" notice approximately 18 hours after the "will update in 3 hours" notice.

To my immense surprise I still have Firefox windows in more than one of my virtual desktops. This does not happen when Firefox restores its windows after a system reboot. I've presumed it also wouldn't work after Firefox exited and restarted without a reboot.

At this point I don't know whether or not Firefox actually has restarted. When I wake up a bit more, I'll see what I can figure out, but I foolishly didn't record its various pids, or the version number it said it was running before the update the notification claimed was happening ten hours ago.

There ought to be a way to get ps to tell me "when was this process launched", but I failed to find one yesterday. Maybe I wasn't careful enough in checking its man page.

FWIW, I think I have notably fewer Firefox windows than when I went to bed last night, but could easily be wrong. I've been reducing the number of firefox windows I left open since the current round of update nagging started, since getting them back to their original/proper virtual desktops after a reboot is such a PITA. Easier just to reopen more of them in the right place, and only when immediately needed.

p.s. Posting from the old Mac. Until I'm sure this forced update has actually happened, I don't trust Firefox on my Kubuntu system not to restart itself while I'm typing, losing my work in progress.