Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:126.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/126.0 ID:20240326211853

I've used the About Dialog to download the recent update to Firefox Nightly (20240402094108) and then clicked the restart button. After Firefox restarted I got an update dialog for installing the update, which means it was not yet applied.

I don't see why the update wasn't able to get installed by the first restart of Firefox as triggered via the about dialog. When I check the update.status file I can see pending-elevate. Otherwise there is only the complete mar file, and active-update.xml file (as attached) present but no update log.

Note that I've modified the default setting to not automatically install updates, but let me choose to install them.

Note that this can be reproduced as long as I restart Firefox through the about dialog. Only when I hit the restart button from the newly opened Updater dialog the upgrade actually gets applied. As it looks like the about dialog does not bring up the MacOS elevation dialog where I've to enter my credentials.

Even by using the update dialog the update is not correctly installed and I end-up with the situation as described on bug 1888073.

(In reply to Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1] from comment #2)

Even by using the update dialog the update is not correctly installed and I end-up with the situation as described on bug 1888073.

Actually not. The update can clearly not be applied due to an error. The credentials I've correctly entered.

Interesting is that when using a different profile the update can be correctly applied when restarting through the software update dialog which automatically pops-up during startup of Firefox.

(In reply to Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1] from comment #4)

Interesting is that when using a different profile the update can be correctly applied when restarting through the software update dialog which automatically pops-up during startup of Firefox.

Can you still reproduce the problem in the original profile?

I would have to wait for the next Nightly to ship. Let me try it once that happened. I'll then not update Firefox until this problem is clearer.

Interesting is as well that I saw similar issues with other applications as well. Some are not able to update themselves - but they don't show any details of the update error. So my hope is that we can do better here.

A partial update actually worked. I'll wait until next Monday to try again with a full / complete update.

Today the update worked just fine as well for a full MAR file. Given that I cannot reproduce at the moment I'm going and close this bug as incomplete, but will reopen once the issue is visible again.

Maybe this bug was related to bug 1890764 which got fixed.

Ok, so I hit the same problem again. After restarting Firefox from within the about window the elevation dialog never poped-up and as such the update failed the first time. I had to restart Firefox a second time to get the update applied.

Here the steps that I did for a Firefox Nightly build that was more than a week old:

1. Download the update via the hamburger menu
2. Opened the about dialog and selected restart Firefox to apply the update
3. Firefox restarted with the update dialog opened - no update applied (see the attachment update-after-first-restart.zip)
4. Clicked the Restart Firefox button in the software update dialog
5. Firefox restarted, asking for the credentials in the elevation prompt and applied the update (see attachment update-after-second-restart.zip)

Why does the first restart not trigger the elevation prompt? Note that I'm also running as administrator on this system.

Oh. That is all expected actually. I don't have a great explanation for why it was designed this way, but update was designed to intentionally not apply an update that needs elevation without asking the user if its okay to elevate first. And we don't ask if it's okay to elevate until Firefox starts up with an update that requires elevation.

Like I said, I don't have a great explanation for why things work this way. I would certainly be happy to revisit this decision.

Thanks for the details. Let me update the bug's summary to better reflect this special situation then.

Just going to reword things slightly and make this an enhancement request, since the behavior is currently the expected behavior.

Just one more note... even when I have restarted Firefox the software update dialog might not be opened in the foreground and is hidden, as what I just had. Trying another update via the about dialog results in the exact same behavior which can be confusing for a user. Maybe the click on update in the about dialog should open the software update dialog in the foreground instead?