Updating as a least privilege user

[hamidzzz]

Dear firefox developers

I'd like to bring to your attention that the Firefox update requires administrative privileges which is not apparently available to a usual windows domain user.

In comparison, Chrome can update itself without asking for those privileges. This discourages users from keep using your great web browser.

Please take appropriate actions.

[jscher2000]

Hmm, I think the Mozilla Maintenance Service was supposed to solve this problem. Are you sure Firefox was not originally installed by running the installer as the administrator? That might cause ongoing problems.

[ARPcPro]

I am here to complain about the same issue described in the original post because I am experiencing exactly the same problem in our environment.

Every week, we prepare and ship 20 to 30 new PCs to our customers with Firefox pre-installed. Our customers use third-party applications that launch Firefox via a link or shortcut, for example, to open YouTube Music in Firefox or to access their internal Laboratory results web page.

The problem is that when the user clicks on the third-party icon to launch Firefox with a URL, the Mozilla Update Service is triggered when an update is available. Instead of opening what the customer wants, this results in a popup requesting administrator credentials before Firefox can proceed.

Our Windows users are standard (non-admin) users, and they do not have access to administrator credentials. As a result, they get confused and cannot continue. This breaks their workflow and generates support tickets on our side.

This has become a significant issue. I prefer Firefox and have been shipping PCs with Firefox for years, but because of this ongoing problem, I have no choice but to switch. From now on, I will no longer pre-install Firefox on these machines. Going forward, I will ship all computers with Chrome and Edge only, and the third-party applications will be configured to launch Chrome as the browser for those URLs.

This is very unfortunate because I would much rather continue using Firefox, but this persistent update popup makes it impractical in our environment.

Please advise if there is a definitive fix or a recommended friendly configuration without compromising security that prevents the Mozilla Update Service from interfering when launching Firefox from third-party applications.