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...

[KellyK]

This issue has somehow gotten worse... I used to open a single new blank tab for Firefox to tell me that I need to restart (stupid way to deliver that message in the first place,) but now that's not enough, I gotta open a bunch of tabs and attempt some searches before it'll eventually give me the restart message.

It sucks to force us to restart in the first place, but why not give us a proper dialog box saying what needs to happen to fix the frozen browser? It's very strange how long it took to tell me why it was frozen. I can restart it myself just fine, but how am I supposed to know that that's the issue?

It's not respecting my "don't automatically update" setting choice, it's not giving me a countdown before forcing the restart so I can save my work, it's not properly notifying me when it does need to restart. Even if it's necessary to force restarts, it's not necessary for the UX to be this frustrating on top of it.

[avoss]

@KellyK, thanks for the update. On balance, I still think I am better off using Firefox - compared the corporate browsers - and I would love to see it thrive. I am a pretty easy to please user but this one really gets under my skin. I would use private windows more if this thing did not get in the way. Losing things I had open in private windows on these occasions is one of the effects I hate the most.

[ITED]

Stop with the stupid notices that updates are available.  I hate having to close and then continue with my networking.  I am getting really sick and tired of it !!!  About ready to dump FireFox and go with something else that is more user friendly. 

[MajoranaOedipus]

I have browsed throught the entire thread and no Mozilla emplyee has addressed this issue.

Please at least help us with finding the actual parts of the code that do the Firefox-binary-changed checking so that at least we can add patch to stop this annoying behaviour

[Jon]

@MajoranaOedipus and others following along - let me get this in front of the right team and see if there's anything to share

[Venetia]

Hi all, we are currently working on this at the moment and it will address the issues with "restart required". We currently do not have a firm timeline but you can follow on our progress here.

[iamsentme]

@Venetia, it's very sad that the progress page shows "The issue is highly OS-specific and this bug only covers addressing the issue on Windows." I'm on Ubuntu Linux. Any chance this will ever get fixed for me?

[Mattis]

@Venetia @iamsentme I had the exact same reaction when reading this. 

In my case, though, the issue has improved since I moved to Linux Mint and disabled snap. Now it only updates when I run 'apt upgrade', not (what feels like) randomly.

[Venetia]

I hear you.

Let us figure it out for Windows first. That should give us better idea if we can and what it will take to pursue it on Linux as well.

[nickyp123]

@Venetiathis bug affects me on mac and Linux and is the #1 issue I have with firefox, and the reason I can't recommend it to my peers. Forcing me to update when I'm in the middle of something, or have important private tabs is a very poor user experience.

[Tad_SPACE_Naff]

Hi I'm back with a Mozilla-Aware Update Script for Linux users (I posted it here a couple weeks ago, but I guess this platform doesn't like it when you paste code or use certain words). It doesn't do anything that half-intelligent pre- and post-install scripts couldn't do, but I guess by dint of being fully intelligent, the package maintainers decided it would be better for Firefox to just absolutely annoy its user base instead.

Being neither a package maintainer nor fully intelligent, I'm free to make this bash script that you can run instead of unattended-upgrades on Ubuntu or whatever it's called on Fedora.

[NorthernDean]

Agree whole-heartedly!   I am in a rush, got to pay my rent before going out the door, everything seems fine until I type in the address and hit enter, and then BAM, I have to restart.  I have to wait, go to the other room and get my phone to do my 2FA, log back into my web sites, etc.  Give me a pop up and let me schedule it at least a day before forcing me!

[ranging005]

Yes, yes, yes--why all these forced restarts?

I keep losing my place in things, starting over documents or forms, and it takes forever to log back into everything. It makes no sense to do this in the middle of what I'm doing, especially when I close the browser every night anyway!

Frankly, I'm surprised I stuck with it this long.