Because Firefox is a multi-process application and it needs to start and stop processes at various times, it will eventually stop working after an update if you don't do a restart because when it goes to start a new process, the program files no longer match what is currently running.

I suggest setting Firefox to ask you before installing an update. On the Preferences page, type update in the tiny search box to pull the relevant setting into view. Firefox will show a notification when an update is available and you can Dismiss (snooze) it with a click. Firefox will remind you again in 12 hours, or sometimes more often, I'm not sure how the schedule is determined.

Thanks for trying, but that doesn't work for me jscher2000. No results in the Preference page. I'm on firefox whatever-version-i-was-just-made-to-update-to . Any further guidance on how to find that option?

I have switched `app.update.auto` to false ( in about:config page of course ) , and will see what happens. Hopefully I can figure out how to manually trigger updates in a few days, or something else.

This is not your problem, but just to say to anyone at Moz doing dev work, if this doesn't allow me to have some warning and control over this intentional browser crash (that's effectively what this update process is) then I'm going to switch to Brave. I believe in Firefox and am pretty damn stubborn, but in the age of web apps this is a broken feature and I'm getting fed up. That's probably not a big deal for yall, but just offering some feedback, yall do yall.

I'd even pay monthly for a firefox that gave me some warning/snooze before updates

For others, James' reply here may help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1373580#question-reply

tldr If you're using a package-manager, the package-managed version of Firefox has that option disabled. So you need to remove that version and install from the Firefox website, and maybe that will work.

I look forward to trying this out, hope it works, and hope it works for others.

tldr If you're using a package-manager, the package-managed version of Firefox has that option disabled.

Aha, yes, this thread was started by a Mac user. We generally encourage starting your own question with your system details to get appropriate advice.