How to stop automatic updates of Firefox on Linux systems

[cjsmall]

Firefox 78 (and prior) is constantly updating itself and forcing restarts on my Xubuntu 19.10 system at very inconvenient times during the day. This must stop!

The Options/Preference for this has been removed since Version 65 or there about. I see a policy kit option to fix this on Windows, but have found no suggestions for Linux. Can someone please describe a method to turn this off and allow only manual updates?

Thanks.

[cjsmall]

Following up to my own question. I think I discovered the problem and post this to help anyone else in a similar situation.

It looks like the problem is not with Firefox pushing out the unwanted update, but with a facility in Ubuntu that performs unattended upgrades. Apparently, someone decided that Firefox should be one of the packages to get this treatment and scheduled it for an unattended update.

To stop this behavior on a Ubuntu (and maybe other Linux) system:

sudo vi /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

Look for: Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist

Add firebox to the blacklist to stop the unattended updates as shown below.

Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist {
"firefox";
};

You can monitor the unattended upgrade actions by inspecting:

/var/log/unattended-upgrades/unattended-upgrades.log*

Hopefully, that will resolve the issue. Here is a link to a thread where I learned about this:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1279041/disabling-firefox-background-upgrades