Intent To Ship: Background Application Update

[Kirk Steuber]

If you run Nightly or Beta on Windows, you may already have noticed that Firefox can now update in the background, without needing to be run. We will soon be bringing this feature to Release as well!

Platforms:

This is currently a Windows-only feature.

Schedule:

Update changes are inherently risky since it can be hard to recover from mistakes. Additionally, after we enable an update feature, we don't really know the results until the next update. Thus, this will be rolling out very slowly. This rollout will begin for Release in version 90. We currently plan for the feature to be enabled for all Windows users by version 95.

How it works:

We use the Windows Task Scheduler to schedule a background update task every 7 hours. This task runs the Firefox binary in a stripped-down, headless mode (Background Task Mode). Firefox checks for updates and, if any are found, it starts the update download via the Windows background download service (BITS) and exits. Each time the task runs after this, it will check the update status and prepare it for installation, or install it, if it is ready. If interactive Firefox is started at any point in this process, it will seamlessly take over the update process, allowing it to continue working as it currently does.

More Information:

Meta Bug: Bug 1343669

Background Task Mode Documentation

Watch the feature roll out on STMO

There is a SUMO article in the works, but unfortunately, it isn't quite ready yet.

Questions?

We'd be happy to talk to you on Slack in the #install-update channel, or on Element in the Firefox Install & Update channel.