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Enable or Disable Automatic Updates in Firefox

Posted on by 27 Comments

I don’t like Firefox constantly updating the version or the Add-ons all by itself  at startup without my knowledge. You can enable or disable automatic updates in Firefox with these steps.

From Firefox Menus

  1. Select the “Menu” Menu Button button in the upper-right corner, then choose “Options“.
  2. Select “General” on the left pane.
  3. Scroll down to the “Firefox Updates” section.
  4. Select one of the following options as desired:
    • Automatically install updates
    • Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them
    • Never check for updates
  5. Check or uncheck the “Use a background service to install updates” option as desired.

From about:config Menu

  1. Type “about:config” in the address bar, then press “Enter“.
  2. Search for the “app.update.auto” setting.
  3. Double-click the “app.update.auto” option to toggle the setting. If set to “true“, automatic updates are enabled. If set to “false“, automatic updates are disabled.

Via prefs.js file

  1. Close Firefox.
  2. Navigate to the following location based on your operating system.
    • Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 – “%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox“
    • Unix/Linux – “~/.mozilla/“
    • Mac OS X – “~/Library/Mozilla/” or “~/Library/Application Support/“
  3. Open the “Profiles” folder.
  4. Open the folder that represents the profile you would like to edit. The name of the folder will vary. It is usually a bunch of characters, followed by “.default”.
  5. Open the prefs.js file with a text editor like Notepad.
  6. Look for a line that contains app.update.enabled. If it doesn’t exist, add a line for it in the file and set it as desired using these examples:
    • user_pref("app.update.enabled", true); = Automatic updates enabled
    • user_pref("app.update.enabled", false); = Automatic updates disabled

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Comments

  1. get ver 60.4.0 or older if you want disable updates. at mozilla search ‘previous versions’ on
    Advanced Install Options & Other Platforms

  2. Eachtime I get another notification popup for yet another update at startup.
    I used Firefox for many years but this is getting so annoying that I will switch soon to another browser.

  3. FF 64 removes useful options such as opening page “blank” and a seperate set of “home pages”. FF63 removed many of the options to control updating. When will the devlopers stop telling users how they must conform?
    Unfortunately I tried all the options here and it still notifies me that I should update.

  4. Horrible constant updates and I do not have a preferences option to STOP them Arrrrrrgh, so frustrating.

  5. The “never check for updates” option seems to have been removed in the most recent update (I updated to 64.0.2 on MacOS recently). Is there another way to achieve this? I do not want to be bugged by this (every couple of days, apparently), and never, ever want the check to occur auotmatically, even if it doesn’t do the auto-install. I’ll quit using the SW if this doesn’t get fixed.

  6. I need to stay on Firefox v.56 in order to run external tools that require this version.
    The tools don’t need to open the UI so it went fine for a while.
    I then opened the UI once and all was good, and then when I opened the UI again it went on and auto-installed the latest version.

    The suggested fix in this page’s article didn’t cut it for me, but the following seems to workaround the auto-updated:

    (*) Note: This was validated for v56 under a linux (Ubuntu) system, I can’t vouch for other FF/OS versions.

    1. Install firefox
    2. Open the menu and go to Preferences
    3. Under the “Firefox Updates” section, select “Never check for updates”
    4. By this time, the auto-update mechanism already kicked into action and will auto-install the latest version upon the next app launch.
    5. Close firefox
    Note that at this point, you should already have a ~/.mozilla directory, containing your saved preferences.
    6. Uninstall firefox and re-install it.
    7. Launch firefox
    At this point FF will pick up your preferences (from the ~/.mozilla directory) and will have the “Never check for updates” flag pre-configured on launch, and will thus not auto-update anymore.

    Bonus:
    Comment #137 on Mozilla’s issue regarding this subject (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1420514) specifies how to disable updates on newer versions (I’ll assume it’s relevant to v64+ and maybe even v63+).

    Following is the comment’s content.
    Cheers.

    —
    You can turn off updates using our policy support:

    https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/README.md

    Create a directory called “distribution” in the same directory as your Firefox executable (Firefox.app/Content/Resources on Mac).

    Create a file called policies.json in that directory and put the following in it:

    {
    “policies”: {
    “DisableAppUpdate”: true
    }
    }

    And you won’t get asked for updates.

    If you’re on Windows, you can also use GPO to do it.
    —

  7. Firefox had removed all its good features and added many bloatwares which are hidden and not adjustable.
    about:config do not longer help you prevent htese bloatwares for example bugging you to update, tracking your movements, habits, behavior and timing. Mozilla is now turned into another tracking tool like Facebook, Google, Paypal, Ebay, Aliexpress, Alibaba and many others. I am afraid these tools will sell our information.

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