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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Background updates! Hooray! That may sound like a basic table stakes feature but honestly it's a huge improvement. And a lot of other apps do a terrible job of it, particularly on Windows. It's remarkable how many apps require 8, 10 mouse clicks and a restart to install a minor update. Firefox didn't require any clicks but the nag / need to restart was a nuisance.

Actually now that I type that I wonder what has changed. I guess the upgrade appears to happen faster because it was done before the restart? I assume Firefox itself still has to be restarted for the update to be effective.

(No problem on a Windows system; the OS reboots itself so often Firefox is guaranteed to before too long :-P)

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The only problem is their god awful "welcome to the new version! we care about privacy!" screen that comes up every other time you open the browser. I don't think anybody has ever seen one of those and thought it was delightful.

The key here is "while Firefox is not running." They have a maintenance service now that can check for updates when the browser is closed.

Personally, I wish they hadn't done that. First, because my browser is always open. But also because I don't need another service.

That's not how it works, actually. The checks are done by a scheduled task.

Are you sure? The OP links to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-mozilla-maintenanc...

The maintenance service is used to avoid UAC prompts during upgrades. That feature has been around for over a decade now.

The background update stuff uses the Windows task scheduler to schedule update checks, not the maintenance service.

(I used to work on the team that at the time owned this stuff)

As sibling comment says the checks are a scheduled task. And it's opt-in so don't worry. You aren't forced to it.

The maintenance service is not checking for updates. It is still Firefox itself that checks for updates, but instead of launching the updater.exe (which triggers the UAC dialog), Firefox will start the maintenance service and tell the service there is a new update. The service will stop Firefox, run the updater to install the new version of Firefox (which does not require a UAC because the service already has elevated permissions), restart Firefox (updated version), and then stop itself. So this is not your typical update service such as Java or Adobe have which continuously runs in the background, but rather an interesting trick to run executables with elevated on-demand of a non-elevated executable.

How does the service authenticate Firefox?

> The service will stop Firefox, run the updater to install the new version of Firefox (which does not require a UAC because the service already has elevated permissions), restart Firefox (updated version), and then stop itself.

The service asks before stopping Firefox? Also, what if I have private tabs open, does it retain those in the session when it restarts?

Several years ago, I had to use this trick to automate an MSSQL install via powershell remoting. One of the operations the installer performed was disallowed for powershell remoting sessions. So I set up my script to create a service and then invoke the installer from the service, which worked perfectly. Whatever security checks they had on powershell remoting sessions weren't much more than security theater. Not sure if this is still the case, but it seems that this is still a useful trick.

This is about when Firefox isn't running. The background update as you take it to mean has been the case for about a decade.

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