Firefox – How to make Firefox stop forcing me to restart the browser

firefox

About every two days I'll open up a tab in Firefox and it'll say:

"You have to restart yadda yadda, here's a cute dinosaur."

It breaks my flow, and is not worth it in the least because I don't care about updates more than once a year.

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Is there a setting anywhere in about:config that'll stop Firefox from this incessant behind the scenes updating which then interjects with a "stop everything and restart" the moment I open a new tab?

Can I maybe make the updates happen when I open Firefox instead of when opening a new tab?

Can I perhaps make it update on a yearly basis rather than this constant one?

If not, how can I make Firefox stop bothering me about updates entirely?

I did see some posts about stopping automatic updates and that kind of thing, but I'm primarily looking for a way to just keep them from interjecting in the middle of what I'm doing.

EDIT: When it was suggested that I disable updates from the setting in preferences, I found that setting already disabled.

EDIT2: Currently running FF68 Dev edition, on OSX 10.14

Best Answer

You can tell Firefox that you want it to stop automatically installing updates.

Use the "hamburger" menu (the three horizontal lines) in the upper right, then choose Options.

Then, in the General section, scroll down to the Firefox Updates section. Change to the Check for updates but let you choose to install them option:

screenshot of the Firefox Updates section of the Options dialog where the option is present

While some have reported that this option has been removed, it still shows up in Firefox 81.0 (64-bit, Windows).

Other systems, perhaps where the system's own package manager is responsible for keeping Firefox up-to-date, do not show the option (screenshot is from a 64-bit Linux system):

screenshot of the Firefox Updates section of the Options dialog where the option is missing

Disclaimer

Preventing software from being kept up-to-date is not a good security practice. It is strongly recommended that you let the updating mechanism do its thing. If you only update once a year, it is likely that more than just "your flow" will get broken.

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