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Half the point of asking questions in a public sub is so that everyone can benefit from the answers—which is impossible if you go deleting everything behind yourself once you've gotten yours.
Not trying to offend, but it comes with the territory. You are choosing to use the nightly build, you WILL experience problems if you don't restart to complete the updates. Stability comes from full releases after people like you and I spend a few weeks dealing with extra testing steps like this. This is very pro consumer in my opinion, would much rather have the option of installing Nightly than not
This right here. I've been running the nightly build of FF for years. It feels good knowing that I am helping them iron out any bugs that popup.
How else do you expect to load the new version of a build?
Don't updates generally require a restart?
Yep. This is how updates work for all software.
Is there a missing screenshot here?
Good explanation at https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/x55hon/comment/in09szk.
you're running multiple profiles of Firefox at the same time (so restarting one with a queued update writes the changes to disk, throwing the other profile instances out of alignment).
In that case, launching a different profile in a new window should not use the new version. In other words, Firefox should not do anything with the pending version until the user actually restarts the entire browser. Having the second window run in the new version just because there was a pending version seems like a bad approach.
Exactly this. I often browse the interwebs while waiting for updates to finish. If Firefox gets updated, it'll prompt me to restart it.
Not sure ht the big deal is here. 🤷🏻♀️
The problem is that the user should not be prevented from browsing the web just because a new update is ready. The user should choose when to update. If the user has multiple important tabs open, they should be able to finish their work, but if Firefox refuses to load any new tabs, then the user cannot continue working normally.
But if the program isn't restarted then it could become unstable or crash. You shouldn't really have any software running while doing updates anyway. I browse the web knowing that I'll need to restart Firefox so I never do anything of import while waiting.
I’m not “doing updates”. I’m just using Firefox normally.
OP here. Most of the comments completely missed the point, but whatever.
What was missed?
The problem is not that you need to restart the browser to update it. The problem is that Firefox refuses to load any new web pages until you restart. So for example, the user might be working on something and have multiple tabs open. And then they need to open another web page in order to finish the work, but Firefox refuses to load the page. If the user restarts Firefox, all the opened pages will reload, and some context will be lost. But if the user does not restart Firefox, they can’t open any new web pages, which prevents them from finishing the work. It’s a lose-lose situation for the user. The only solution is to open the web pages in a different browser. The fact that Firefox forces users to use different browsers is not good.
Need more info about the running environment.
How do you update software? Package manager?
No, it’ just a macOS application. Firefox updates itself automatically on macOS.
This is actually not unique to Nightly - the stable build does it, too.
I do recognize that scheduling updates is hard - no user ever wants to stop what they're doing and restart something, and it's important to keep users from running problematically out of date software.
I agree with OP though that this particular interaction is unusually frustrating for me. This message only appears after trying to load a link or a new tab, meaning it's actively waiting for me to want to use the browser before telling me that I can't, essentially guaranteeing it will interrupt my workflow.
I don't have a good suggestion on how to fix this without making the update system less robust - it might just be a necessary evil - but I do feel that OP's concern is legitimate.
Could Firefox not delay the update until the user actually restarts the browser?
