I installed Firefox a couple of years ago in my home directory, and updated it (via the automatic update mechanism) a few times since then. However, for quite some time now the auto update has not been working. Currently, if the about screen is to be believed, it is at version 16.0.2. If the update history is to be believed, it was last updated November 1 last year. When I click on "Check for Updates" in the about screen, it says "Firefox is up to date". This is clearly false. Obviously I can update it by hand now that I know the auto-update is broken. However, it is IMHO extremely dangerous and irresponsible for Mozilla to provide an auto-update feature that does not work consistently. If, for some reason, it's no longer *possible* for the auto-update system to work (e.g. stuff has changed so much since 16.0.2 that you really have to reinstall from scratch, or if something else is preventing it from updating), then it should *tell* me so rather than saying "Firefox is up to date". A false sense of security is worse than useless.