[bachmeier]

> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case.

I absolutely LOVE the way Firefox dies to force you to restart your browser. Silently updates in the background, then all of a sudden it stops working and you don't know why. Who among us hasn't wanted to be teaching a class with dozens of students and have their browser die? Guess they're going after those that yearn for the days of Windows 98 stability.

[bilkow]

This actually only happens when you update Firefox through your distro's package manager when its running (or your distro updates automatically in the background).

[burnte]

That makes more sense because I've never encoutered this bug but my distro doesn't have a Firefox package, I use the "Windows" distro from Microsoft. Very stable and highly compatible anymore.

[sjcoles]

Unfortunately your distro decides when software updates and leaves very little in your control. Not very stable if it is updating things without your permission.

[burnte]

Those are OS updates, not appolication updates.

[pitaj]

This has never happened to me.

[foepys]

I'm using two different profiles at work simultaneously with the Firefox Developer Edition. When Firefox updates in the background, sometimes new tabs just don't work anymore and keep loading indefinitely.

But I cut Mozilla some slack for it since this is a pretty unusual setup and the Developer Edition is updating quite a lot compared to the release branch and it doesn't happen all the time.

[kaba0]

That’s more of an issue with the package manager that most likely deleted the actual executable underneath. Firefox’s in-built auto-update doesn’t do so.

[foepys]

It happened just a few days ago to a colleague of mine.

[serf]

it happens pretty routinely to me on computers that idle with browsers for long periods.

example : a cctv kiosk I have just sits on a URL all day.

It updates silently and breaks the browser sometimes a few times a month, facilitating remote administration to reset.

The other lovely behavior is when after an update the tab to show update notes is prioritized upon browser auto-restart -- thus covering up the cctv kiosk tab with something advertising firefox changes.

Firefox is getting harder to love, (thankfully?) so is the competition in most cases.

[derefr]

I'm surprised there isn't a browser-ish application purpose-built to be used as a webview of a single site, with no distractions, that does the right thing when self-updating (= wait for a scheduled maintenance window, restart, then reload everything exactly as it was.) This app would be to browsers, as Windows IoT Core (nee Windows Embedded) is to regular Windows: the thing you run on a kiosk to minimize the need for interactive administration and maximize useful uptime.

I mean, you can kind of use Electron for this, but it's not designed to be used this way (i.e. to be used un-customized as a long-running service with hot updates.) It's designed as an SDK for developers to produce apps with, not as an app in-and-of itself.

https://fluidapp.com/ exists, but it's not multiplatform, and it still doesn't address the needs of the embedded market either.

[nitrogen]

Firefox has a kiosk mode; I wonder if they didn't consider the effect of updates on kiosk mode.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-kios...

[bachmeier]

They even have a special page for it. I keep it handy because this seems to be the only response anyone ever makes when I bring it up:

"Firefox has just been updated in the background. Click Restart Firefox to complete the update."

It would at least be a minor improvement if they'd open a new tab to show you that information. Instead you're refreshing the page wasting everyone's time because it doesn't always tell you that's what's going on.

[sciurus]

IIRC this only occurs if you are using your distro's firefox package. If your package manager upgrades firefox out from under it, things break and you have to restart Firefox to get back in a sane state.

If you use Mozilla's build of Firefox and it's built-in update system I think this won't happen.

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on this)

[addicted]

I believe this also happens with certain pre release editions (Nightly, which I use) which is absolutely reasonable.

[prionassembly]

Would you agree it’s still bad UX if it only happens to people who haven’t gone out of their way to get a “good” Firefox?

[ben0x539]

It's bad UX but how far should Firefox go out of its way to support the situation where a (from its perspective) third-party package manager just deleted all its files, replacing them with subtly different/newer ones?

[dastx]

Unlike Microsoft and Apple, on Linux you're never forced to upgrade. Thus, when you do upgrade, you should really be checking what packages are upgraded. The alternative to such a page would be to require you to stop Firefox before the updates start. So it is still a trade off.

[PostOnce]

it says something like "we need to restart to keep going" and you have to reload the browser, without warning, and it's hard to turn off without fucking around in about:config

[kwk1]

This is a fairly common occurrence for anyone running a Debian-family Linux distribution with unattended-upgrades turned on.