Disabling Automatic Update

Many users do not want Application Update to run automatically. This page describes different ways to accomplish this.

Update Only With User Permission

This is the only option that can be activated from within Firefox. With this mechanism, Firefox checks for updates as it normally would. When it finds one, a notification is shown letting the user know that an update is available and requesting permission to download and install it. When this is accepted, the process continues as it would in automatic application update: the download is started, and then installed the next time Firefox restarts. If the user doesn’t do this on their own within a update-channel-dependent time frame, a notification will be shown prompting the user to restart to update.

To use this mechanism:

Navigate the browser to about:preferences or click on “Settings” in the hamburger menu.
Find the Update section. This can be done by searching for “Update”.
Select the option “Check for updates but let you choose to install them”.

Pin Firefox’s version

This option is intended for managed enterprise installations that want to keep Firefox at a particular version on many machines. At some point, generally after testing the new Firefox version for compatibility with needed resources, installations of Firefox on all machines should be updated. This can be done by setting a pin to the version needed. Then, once prepared for the update, the pin can be changed to the new version. Note that pins cannot be used to downgrade Firefox.

Since this option can prevent updates from being installed without specific, unprompted user action, it cannot be changed from within the browser for security reasons.

To activate this feature, see the instructions on how to use Policies, here, as well as the specific Policy, here.

Manual Updates Only

This option disables automatic update checking except when the user loads the update UI. It will not prompt the user to update. Updates can only be installed by clicking the button in the update UI, which can be found in the Update section of about:preferences or in the Help->About dialog.

Since this option can prevent updates from being installed without specific, unprompted user action, it cannot be changed from within the browser for security reasons.

To activate this feature, see the instructions on how to use Policies, here, as well as the specific Policy, here.

Fully Disable Updates

This option disables the update system altogether, preventing Firefox from being able to update. Neither automatic update nor manual update will function.

Since this option can prevent updates from being installed without specific, unprompted user action, it cannot be changed from within the browser for security reasons.

To activate this feature, see the instructions on how to use Policies, here, as well as the specific Policy, here.