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...

[Nick2000]

Is any working solutions yet?

[Nick2000]

I fully support you frustration this is worse thing in this browser, sometimes I even think to get rid of Firefox and switch to something like Ungoogled Chromium.

Right now i removed all permissions from Updated.exe and hope it will help.

[Ipsrich]

I've posted to this thread before.  I can't believe how long it's taking to get a solution for what is frankly a horrendous blunder of UI design!  As I've said before, feel free to warn and remind me (even loudly) until I restart Firefox, but don't prevent me from continuing to browse.

Last time this happened, I was right in the middle of a purchase, partway through checking out, in fact, and it happened that the process included opening a new tab — which of course rudely and bluntly demanded that I restart Firefox.

I had no choice, but was irked, to say the least.  Thankfully, after restarting, I was still able to complete the purchase.  I don't need the stress of uncertainty though!

[Nick2000]

Unfortunately, removing permission from "Updater.exe" did not help, so we will have to move on to more drastic measures, so i just removed "Updater.exe" and block access to "aus5.mozilla".org via "hosts" file, will see if it helps.

[TomH1]

Its fixed. It no longer blocks usage.
Win 10 

Firefox 135.0.1

[Xebtria]

@TomH1I still got it today at work again, I think it was when it updated to 135.0.1

will continue monitoring in the future.

[Xebtria]

@TomH1still got it today at work, when it updated to 135.0.1

will continue monitoring in the future.

[Nick2000]

This is not fixed, I had exactly the same problem a few hours ago and it's so annoying that I was almost going to uninstall FF but I decided to give it one last chance.

[TomH1]

Here is my screenshot of it waiting until I restart the browser.

[Ipsrich]

Yep, definitely not fixed.  Updated just now, and here's my "about" dialogue on top of a tab where I just tried going to Google..

 Please, Firefox team, we're really not being unreasonable in our request!

[plsstopthis]

beside that this annoyes me a lot as well, there's a workaround that was described in 2022:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/get-rid-of-the-quot-restart-required-quot-in-firefox/idc-p/1203...

change that setting and FF won't force you any more to update. You'll need to click dismiss sometimes, though you can continue your work.

[TomH1]

I'm pulling from several posts who did troubleshooting so these are not my results. I am intermixing my thoughts with theirs to see if this causes someone to realize what is happening for real.

Linux: alx84 stated the snap package is keeping binaries up to date and making firefox to have fits because its running with some older libraries while it late loads other packages that are now new. So it seems like firefox needs to be containerized either by Mozilla, or by us users so that each new firefox install is isolated. Also turn off auto updating packages ??? Lots of issues with doing this. Also see windows issue below.

Windows: I couldn't find the user who asserted this: There are two users logged into Windows and one updates firefox while the other did not. The one did not has the same issue as Linux users. I personally got laid off, so I stopped using my corporate acct on my personal desktop and this issue went away. So I fully believe updating various software and Patch Tuesday without rebooting is the issue.

[Ipsrich]

@plsstopthisI don't think that workaround works in all circumstances: my Firefox is installed via apt, and when my Linux software manager does an auto-update in the background, it doesn't pay attention to the app.update.auto setting.  Every other app I use happily installs updates in the background without forcing me to restart the app; why can't Firefox?!

[Nick2000]

@plsstopthis 

Already did this, doesn't help.
So I decided to go further, hoping that this will solve the problem.
And especially considering the new rules for collecting personal data in FF, I won't update the browser until this changes.

[Tad_SPACE_Naff]

@Ipsrichon Linux, which is the only thing I've used non-trivially for a couple decades now, packages get handled (installed/reinstalled/removed) by the package manager (apt, yum, pacman, emerge, and many more depending on your distribution) and the application itself has little to do with it. Probably it's a combination of Linux users being used to such things, and the transitory nature of most applications in terms of whether they're running or not, that nobody complains if a running application crashes after an update -- stuff happens, there's an obvious cause, just start it again and the new version kicks in.

I think the Mozilla take on Firefox though is that a) browsers are always-on, b) for most users browsers are also the biggest security target, c) who knows what might happen if the browser gets into an undefined state because its code got changed on the fly -- what if by some fluke it still functions but all of the SSL silently fails, I dunno, I'm a coder but I code at a much higher level. So anyway, the prudent thing would be to watch your own code and do something if a change is detected. Fair, so far so good, other applications do this too (still others have more intelligent update scripts that put the new version in a staging location). But the issue we all have is with the something that Mozilla decided to do, which was to implement a UX nightmare.

I'm cool with a crash. Like I say, Linux users expect crashes. But if I can't have a crash then maybe an un-dismissable pop-up: it might say "Firefox has been updated in the background. After you acknowledge this dialogue Firefox will continue to run for five minutes* and then restart. Please save any unsaved work you may have in currently open tabs." And then you click "OK" and it shows a countdown until it restarts.

Of course this assumes that Firefox can run well enough after its code has been updated for the user to actually wrap things up. And I think that's why we have what we have: the risk is assessed as too high if the browser continues to run in an unknown state.

So then, what to do. Well I've mentioned it above, and elsewhere here: the install/update scripts used by apt/yum/whatever are dumb. I don't know where they come from or what they're based on, but conceptually all that needs to happen is that the new code gets installed to a "staging" location different from the existing installation. The currently running Firefox can watch that staging location and do the alert thing above, but now its code hasn't changed, so people can actually take some kind of action. On restart, the application can replace itself with the staged version.

None of this is new, by the way. If their priorities weren't so inverted, we'd have decent updates and instead be asking when Firefox was ever going to get an annoying and incorrect AI assistant.

*"Five minutes" might be max(5, {number of tabs}*{some experimentally found average duration for resolving a tab}*{1.5 or so to be polite}). Good luck me, the guy who regularly has 50+ tabs going on.