Firefox needs several restarts for updates
These past few versions of Firefox, I've been having this issue:
(Updates are set to manual, addon compatibility is disabled)
1) Check for updates. 2) There are -say- 3 updates! 3) Update all (or manually click install). They appear to download and install fine, culminating with a "restart" link 4) Please restart! 5) Restart 6) Check addon window. It's clean, no updates. 7) Check for updates 8) There are 2 updates available. Please restart! 9) Restart 10) Check for updates 11) There is 1 update! Please restart!
Note that the first one is always more fruitful then subsequent ones. I believe the first restart also eats restartless addons. For example, first check says 10 updates, then I get 3, 2, 1 and none.
Some of them open web pages with every version installed (why people think that is OK I don't know) so I KNOW they didn't update. Every time I restart Firefox, I get 2 tabs. One "Restart session" and one "You updated S3 download manager!".
Am I the only one having this issue? I assume I could fix it by firing up a new profile, but I don't want to, some of the addons have very intricate settings I don't want to redo. What could prompt Firefox to replace one file but not others? No addons refuse to update, so it's not likely to be an error.
All Replies (5)
hi jim, this might be an issue with firefox not being able to properly save some preferences. please go through this article and see if it applies to your situation: How to fix preferences that won't save
Went though the article step by step (skipping refresh of firefox) and found no issue.
User.js contains 6 preferences that are of little consequence to addons
Already cleaned up user-x.js as part of another problem I had with Firefox not initializing correctly due to Onedrive for 8.1 being a complete asterisk (sync disabled for the folder now)
User.js is writeable without warnings.
Could not find a pref that isn't saved. Everything I set saved and, since this applies to many addons, I can't go though each manually.
Additionally, I should mention that addons all work as expected, so I don't believe there's a corrupt file anywhere.
Any other clues?
please remove the user.js file in case you haven't created it manually yourself in the first case. if this didn't help you also might want to delete all files in the profile folder starting with extensions.*
Already deleted extensions.* as part of my effort to make an addon work (related to that OD mess).
I DID find another issue, however. Because my files were "fixed" by forcing a partial restore from a backup that was a network drive, some files were marked a zone:internet (the "unblock" thing in Properties)
Don't know how much Firefox cares about that, but a quick trip to Powershell solved that. I'll see how Firefox behaves on the next update batch and let everyone know.
The user.js file is read each time Firefox is started and initializes preferences to the value specified in this file, so preferences set via user.js can only be changed temporarily for the current session.
You can delete the user.js file if you didn't create this file yourself, otherwise make sure that is only contains prefs that you want to reset on each start.