Kubuntu 25.10: Self-Updating Firefox

[die.boer]

to say it plainly ,i've said it before ,browsers on snap is shait

[DinoNerd]

well those are all sub processes of the main one just do ps -e | grep firefox

It looks like we basically agree on what was going on, just disagreed on terminology. Phew!

[skyfishgoo]

well those are all sub processes of the main one just do ps -e | grep firefox

[DinoNerd]

my system still only shows one firefox process so if yours shows other, i would suggest try testing with a new user acct to see if your snap is hose up some how

Weird. After several reboots, I ran

 $ps axlwww | grep firefox

Here's part of the results:

[skyfishgoo]

in the system monitor you need to set the column to PID for it to match what is shown in ps

my system still only shows one firefox process so if yours shows other, i would suggest try testing with a new user acct to see if your snap is hose up some how

you can also use snap list to see if maybe you have conflicting installs

or snap refresh to make sure you have the latest packages.

[DinoNerd]

After all this fun, I used the command line to update all my debs, and rebooted. Then I checked in with the App store app, in case of pending firmware updates.

No firmware updates, but it already wanted to upgrade firefox yet again. I told it to do so, and it turned out to take time to download, and more time to install. I'm back on the mac typing this, while the kubuntu box gives me updates I don't want. (How could I want them? There's no information about what they changed, to allow me to determine whether anything changed that would benefit me. Discover isn't even clear on whether it's telling me the new firefox version number or the existing one - as it happens, the number shown is the existing one, and it's anyone's guess what it's currently installing, including perhaps the same thing it just installed.

[Edit to add: "snap list" showed the same version number both before and after the "update" Discover wanted to do. But it least it no longer wants to do yet another update.

More. Bugs. Than. An. Anthill.]

[DinoNerd]

Thanks for implicitly pointing out the existence of the system monitor app, which I hadn't yet noticed. It looks like a cousin of MacOS' "Activity Monitor", which is often quite useful.

Now to figure out how to get it to tell me when a process was launched....

No luck on that, but I have determined that its pid column (hidden by default) gives a single pid even when ps is reporting multiple pids associated with the app.

This actually makes a lot of sense, partly because of details of the way linux handles processes and threads internally, and partly because of the way web browsers must be coded to avoid having a single dodgy web page wedge access to every other web page the user is interested in.

In brief, a pid isn't exactly a process id in linux, but also isn't exactly a thread ID. It rarely corresponds one-to-one to what appears to be an app to the user, except in rare simple cases. They were all pretty much the same thing on most classic Unix systems, but that began to change as early as the 1990s. I'm not sure whether linux ever went through a stage where they were all the same, but as of last time I looked, the linux kernel had one of the more sophisticated systems for handling this, with the BSDs trailing behind.

And it's better to have not just multiple threads, but multiple address spaces in a web browser, to keep especially resource greedy web pages from starving better behaved pages the user is also trying to access.

[DinoNerd]

and system monitor shows one PID for firefox starting today 4:20am

Thanks for implicitly pointing out the existence of the system monitor app, which I hadn't yet noticed. It looks like a cousin of MacOS' "Activity Monitor", which is often quite useful.

Now to figure out how to get it to tell me when a process was launched....

[DinoNerd]

no idea what is going on with your machine but i have firefox up with half a dozen tabs open and system monitor shows one PID for firefox starting today 4:20am when i updated it by closing the firefox window this morning and waiting for the confirmation notification that the update was complete.

i suspect you have a bunch of old processes running for some other reason besides firefox needing an update.

I suspect the root cause will be that Kubuntu needs routine reboots to remain stable, and I've been pushing that envelope, basically to find out where its limits are. My system has now been up for 19 days; that's probably too long for a desktop installation of any Ubuntu variant.

To be fair, 19 days is bit too long for MacOS, and was similarly too long for Windows a decade ago when I last used it.

Not all operating systems can be as stable as FreeBSD (uptimes routinely measured in years) or Ubuntu server (months).

[DinoNerd]

Firefox has a "quit" option buried in its hamburger menu, as I suspected it might. It got rid of all 28 firefox processes. The app did not automatically restart, and I did not get an update complete notification.

I waited a little while to make sure the forced upgrade didn't have a relaunch mechanism, or said mechanism was not working, then relaunched it myself.

Still no "update complete" notification, but I do have a large heap of firefox windows in the virtual desktop I relaunched it from. I haven't sorted them out yet, but I'd be unsurprised to find 20 or so.

This is, of course, the aggravation that makes me most angry about the forced update - each time, I have to reassign my windows to desktops.

To be fair, Firefox on Kubuntu 25.10 is less unstable for me than Safari on MacOS Sequoia 15.4. Safari on my Mac has been crashing multiple times a week since it was upgraded to Sequoia, whereas Kubuntu's by-design Firefox outages average one per fortnight.

[skyfishgoo]

no idea what is going on with your machine but i have firefox up with half a dozen tabs open and system monitor shows one PID for firefox starting today 4:20am when i updated it by closing the firefox window this morning and waiting for the confirmation notification that the update was complete.

i suspect you have a bunch of old processes running for some other reason besides firefox needing an update.

[DinoNerd]

This forced update seems to be buggier than an anthill.

I had various useful information about yesterday's state remaining in Konsole (shell) window scrollback.

1) "snap list" reports I'm now running firefox 149.0-1. Yesterday, it claimed I was running firefox 148.0-1

2) ps reports I have 28 firefox processes. Some of these have very low pids, such as 3497. Moreover, at least the first couple of entries in the list have the same low pids as they had yesterday. (I didn't check them all.)

Processes almost never relaunch with the same pid they had before, though I suppose it might be theoretically possible.

I do not see 28 or even 20 firefox windows open. Some may be tabs rather than windows, I imagine, and some may be iconified, but this does not seem remotely normal for this system. (There should be more windows, given this many processes.)

3) I closed the "update in progress" notification and did not get an "update complete notification".

My best guess is that the firefox update somehow stalled partway.

I'll try killing firefox myself and see what happens. If I can kill it as one thing, that makes all 28 processes exit.

Most likely I'll wind up with an unwanted reboot.

Thanks, Canonical. I wish I could force my updates onto your computers, cell phones, etc., particularly those of all your executives. But you probably have paid support staff to fix them for you, reducing the pain.

Meanwhile, once I regain control of my system, I'll make neutering firefox updates a priority. (There are instructions for one way to do that much earlier in this thread.)

[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.

[Qqmike]

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

[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.