Question How to disable Firefox update with about:config?

[jamesdsimone]

What keys in about:config need to be turned off so Firefox will stop nagging about updating. I have no desire to update unless there is a compelling reason. It is really annoying. I use an old i3 laptop and every time the stupuid update happens it locks up for 5 minutes. There used to be an option to shutoff automatic updateres but they took out.

 

[mindless1]

I think it's app.update.service.enabled [false] and/or app.update.auto [false]

My Firefox portable which does not update, has both these toggled, then on the General settings page it reads "Firefox Updates", "Updates disabled by your system administrator"

If you want to disable updating add-ons and extensions too, then AFAIK it's also app.update.service.enabled -and- extensions.update.autoUpdateDefault that need toggled.

However it doesn't seem like it should be locking up for 5 minutes. Are you running it off a USB flash drive, other slow removable media, or a very slow embedded SSD? I'm not trying to convince you to continue updating it, though many who want to keep same version, will instead go with an ESR release version or the portable version. I'm not suggesting you "need" to do that... what I might do instead is just disable auto-update then manually update it when you can accept the 5 minutes downtime, are away from the system, unless you need to keep old add-ons working with an older version of FIrefox.

 

[jamesdsimone]

It's a 10 year old laptop so the hard drive is slow. There is no reason to upgrade it. It's definitely the firefox update that is locking it up. It will lock and when the popup update window finally appears clicking dismiss instantly unlocks it. I only have a few plugins so updating those is not a problem. I can manually update when I feel like I need to. I think I disabled that key already and it didn't help. I changed the update interval to 7 days. The default was 12 hours....f***ing annoying. I'll see if that at least mitigates the problem. There is a registry edit that someone posted I haven't tried yet.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's a 10 year old laptop so the hard drive is slow.

is FAILING. ftfy.

 

[balloonshark]

SSD's are super affordable nowadays. My sister's old laptop with an i3-6100U (2 core 4 thread) and a 5400 rpm HDD would bog down all the time and take forever to boot. I cloned her HDD to a SSD. I looked up how to replace her storage drive for her laptop and following the online laptop manual and a youtube video. With the SSD installed it was a night and day experience.

 

[mindless1]

Yeah, if it's using an old rust spinner (aka HDD), it's well worth switching over to an SSD, even if a low end, low capacity one for $15. It will make a night and day difference. I once updated an ancient Pentium M Laptop (WinXP era), to an SSD using a PATA133 adapter (shucked the SSD's casing to get it to fit in the HDD bay), and even bottlenecked at sub-133MB/s, that was still a massive improvement.

The other reason to upgrade it is as preventative maintenance, clone the drive over to an SSD before it fails. If it fails first, it will probably take $15 worth of your time and aggravation to set back up, and still need a new drive too.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I don't need to upgrade the laptop. I just need Firefox to stop annoying me. It's just a spare I use for a few trivial tasks. I have 3 others, a win7, a Win10 and a Linux Mint, not to mention 3 desktops.

 

[mindless1]

No! You are here and we are spending your money. You have no choice. lol

 

[jamesdsimone]

No! You are here and we are spending your money. You have no choice. lol

I'm currently wasting my money on hard drives for media storage servers that I don't need.

 

[mindless1]

You could just get the portable version then. If/when you want to update that, you simply install a newer portable version, over-top the existing one. Being portable this could allow you to only have to maintain the one instance of Firefox over the multiple systems... or however many you wanted.

 

[balloonshark]

Here are all the update entries in the about:config for future reference.

About:config entries - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

kb.mozillazine.org