Background update task
Hello everyone,
being annoyed of a huge amount of Qualys tickets in my enterprise environment, i have decided to use the ability of firefox to update itself on its own instead of deploying a new version each time.
Requirement: Firefox has to stay up-to-date even on devices where it is not used. That´s what the scheduled background update task and Mozilla Maintenance Service are for, right?
Problem: The background update task will only be created if a logged on user will run firefox at least one time. Since Firefox is used as the secondary browser here, it is installed on all clients, but not even half of the clients/users are running it.
I didn´t find any option to create that task manually. So - at least in my environment - the autoupdate mechanism is useless.
Is there any hope for an autoupdate mechanism which can be run independent of logged on users? Or does anyone have an idea how i could achieve my goal?
Thank you in advance!
All Replies (3)
It's possible for you to schedule the background task on your own. There's some documentation here:
We only schedule it in Firefox out of convenience.
It's something I've been meaning to document better (but not something I have a lot of expertise in)
Hello Mike,
thanks for your reply!
I have already read that documentation. I think it´s documented well. But unfortunately it does not solve my (only my?) problem. If the scheduled task "Firefox Background Update ..." does not exist already on the system, nothing happens if I run the command "firefox --backgroundtask backgroundupdate". I just can see that a file named "UpdateLock" at the ProgramData-Folder is created.
So if I have a computer where firefox is installed but never is run, firefox will never be updated. That´s a problem for an enterprise environment in my opinion. Not exactly what i expect of an automatical update.
For now, I will have to further deploy a new application by MECM each time a new version of firefox is available.
But maybe the mozilla developers might think about redesigning the AutoUpdate-feature. For me the goal would be, that Firefox will be updated via MozillaMaintenanceService as soon as a new version is available, regardless of user settings or logged on users (update as SYSTEM-Account). By the way, I´m talking about Microsoft Windows as operating system. :-)
So we've landed a patch that will update Firefox even if the windows user isn't logged in.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1830071
does this help?