Firefox auto update prompt

Firefox is becoming more aggressive with their “Download a fresh copy of Firefox”, which in previous releases you could set the boolean value “app.update.auto = false” and suppress the update prompt. We are no longer able to do this and Firefox wants user to use the group policy file to make these changes now.


The issue I have run into is that the policy file lives within the snap directory “/snap/firefox/current/distribution”. Is there a solution for this or would it be as simple as creating a symlink directory to my home snap folder and setting the policy file there.

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IMO this should be done by the snap publisher(Mozilla), contact them to set the policy.

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app.update.auto=false doesn’t suppress the update check, it simply commands firefox to not install automatically available updates, effectively resulting in a prompt.

As you stated, the recommended way of disabling update checks is a group policy indeed.

And as suggested by @Lin-Buo-Ren, this should be done by the snap publisher themselves.

Bug #1436457 is related.

I experimented with adding a policies.json file under distribution in a repacked firefox snap, with the following content:

{
  "policies": {
    "DisableAppUpdate": true
  }
}

This disables updates, as expected. However, the about dialog has the following message, which might look scary to non-tech savvy users:

Updates disabled by your system administrator

This is still an improvement over the current situation, so I’m going to submit this upstream to see if the approach is acceptable.

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Change submitted upstream for review.

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