Get rid of the "Restart Required" in Firefox

[istrasci]

Please do not block my browsing session just to force me to restart!  Let me restart when I want to.  For security reasons, I'm almost always browsing in Private Mode, and as such, logins and passwords are not saved.  So when I'm forced to restart because of an update, I have to save my current tab session, reopen them after FF has restarted, and re-login to every site I was using—many of which require 2FA, so it's extra annoying.

This is bad UX!  Put a notification, or even a whole separate tab telling me I need to restart.  But don't block out everything I was doing.  Even Windows doesn't do this...

[Ipsrich]

Is nobody at Mozilla listening to us?!  We're trying to help make Firefox a better, more attractive, more usable product with this request.  I've posted in this thread before, but again today I was bitten by this one.  I was in the middle of something and needed to check something else on a different webpage, but couldn't, so had to use a different browser to avoid losing everything I'd already done -- it's crazy!

[Waffles_ASAP]

EDIT:
This is my second time posting this comment.  The first time I posted it the page refreshed (as it would upon a successful submission) but the comment didn't show up anywhere in the thread.  Not sure what happened there, but re-posting again as I think it's important that Mozilla fixes this behavior. 

I'm a dev by profession and use each of the Safari, Edge, Chrome, and Firefox browsers for at least an hour (each browser) every day when performing functional/integration testing of candidate code changes.  I also spend significant time testing against the mobile versions of all four browsers (both on iOS and Android) weekly.

The FIrefox desktop client is the only browser client that has ever done this sort of thing to me, and it's now happened 6 or 7 times in the past year.  It was unacceptable the first time, and it remains unacceptable today.

----

Original Post:
I hate that Firefox is losing market share, because I DO think Mozilla cares more about privacy than ANY of the other major browser vendors (Apple-, Google-, and Microsoft-included), but I have no idea why Firefox would automatically update itself in the middle of a session by default.  It makes absolutely zero sense.

Why in god's name is the default not set to "Download updates automatically and install them the next time you open Firefox?"  Why would anyone at Mozilla think anyone using Firefox would be okay with being forced to restart their browser mid-session regardless of the user's setting?

I use Firefox on my Windows PC and my Mac, and while I've never had this problem on my Mac, I've had it multiple times on my Windows machine, and I lose data EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. 

It's atrocious UX, and I cannot believe this is still a problem two years after this thread was started.  Users should NOT have to modify the DEFAULT update settings in their browser to avoid absurdly over-bearing forced updating like this.  The default settings should be user-friendly, PERIOD.

[Dburtuk]

Man I am with you, the idea to restart halfway through the user is doing something, it is so frustrating, make it the end of the day when clicking on close the browser. makes me want to use a different browser full stop

[Allendale]

Very very annoying this. Why does this malicious feature even exist? Why is there no way to turn this off inside Firefox? 😒

[avoss]

What bugs me is that even after setting the browser to not automatically update it sometimes decides to refuse to open a new tab.

I do not get why people think it is ever ok to not allow people to continue working. Fine, show in big, bold letters that an update needs to be installed but please, please do not force people to restart mid-session. People do critical things in browsers now such as doing their tax returns, applying for loans, jobs, booking flights, you name it. Some of these cannot easily be re-started and in some cases it is necessary to open windows/tabs to continue.

You are *forcing* people in situations like these to use other browsers they would otherwise not touch with a bargepole. Why would you do that?