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Firefox will not Update

  • 8 cavab
  • 2 have this problem
  • 6 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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This has been happening to me with Firefox 54 and 55 and it will not auto update on my PC. When I go to About Firefox and click Restart to update Firefox or just exit Firefox, nothing shows up on my screen but I see a Firefox.exe and the Updater.exe. After awhile the Firefox Updater exe goes away but the Firefox.exe stays there. If I spawn another Firefox instance I just get multiple instances with no GUI. I have to End the Process. Once I kill all the processes, and start Firefox the GUI now opens, but it's still at the old version. When I manually went to 55 i had completely uninstalled 54 first and then installed 55.0.3, but it's doing the same thing.

This has been happening to me with Firefox 54 and 55 and it will not auto update on my PC. When I go to About Firefox and click Restart to update Firefox or just exit Firefox, nothing shows up on my screen but I see a Firefox.exe and the Updater.exe. After awhile the Firefox Updater exe goes away but the Firefox.exe stays there. If I spawn another Firefox instance I just get multiple instances with no GUI. I have to End the Process. Once I kill all the processes, and start Firefox the GUI now opens, but it's still at the old version. When I manually went to 55 i had completely uninstalled 54 first and then installed 55.0.3, but it's doing the same thing.

All Replies (8)

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If you have trouble with the upgrade, use this link; http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

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That's just a work around, it doesn't solve the problem. I have to do that every time there is an incremental update. So every time Firefox want's to update itself, the next time I start Firefox it won't show the GUI. I have to kill the process and then start it again, then download the update.

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Sometimes an update on top of an update on top of . . . . . . can have problems.

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That's why I tried a clean install with 55.0.3 from 54 and it's the same problem. So there is something with this particular PC that's preventing the update from occurring properly. I just don't know where to look for what's preventing updates from occurring. It gets a little annoying to have to kill processes just to get the browser to load.

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Hi ewrankin, is your Firefox able to shut down fully in a reasonable amount of time under normal circumstances? (I don't know why it would only have this problem when updating and suspect it may be happening more often, unnoticed.)

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Something about your system may be causing the problem.

Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} by holding down the <Shift> (Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox.

A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?


Start your Computer in safe mode with network support. Then start Firefox. Try Safe websites. Is the problem still there?

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Linux+Safe+Mode Starting Any Computer In Safe Mode; Free Online Encyclopedia

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Firefox shuts down just fine. Starting Firefox in Safe Mode didn't help. When I started Windows in Safe Mode with Networking support it did update (although the link provided didn't work, I had to enable safe mode via msconfig). I don't think it's my Virus Scan because I disabled it when I tried in the past. Is there some logs that I could look at next time I try this?

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