Despite its receding user base, Mozilla Firefox has remained my primary browser. Mozilla has revamped Firefox in the last couple of years and has added several features to it especially focused on protecting user privacy. I respect that.
However, there is one ‘feature’ that annoys the hell out of me. This so-called feature relates to the auto-update of Firefox in the background.
Auto-upgrade immediately reminds of Windows updates. I mean, Windows is infamous for the forced restarts and updates, right?
But why am I talking about this in reference to Firefox? Because Firefox, too, has a ‘Windows-que’ feature.
It updates Firefox in the background. No problem there. That’s not entirely a bad thing.
But then if you try to open a website in the new tab, it won’t let you do that unless you restart the browser.
And that small thing stops the users from keep going with their work. What the hell, Mozilla!
You may argue that it’s not that much of a pain. A quick restart won’t bring your world down, Abhishek.
Right but imagine you are busy at work. You have more than 20 tabs opened. That’s normal if you are trying to troubleshoot as a developer, sysadmin, student or just trying to learn something in your field of interest.
You cannot open a new webpage anymore. You have to restart the browser and when you restart, you have to click on each tab manually because Firefox does not load the previously opened web pages on its own. Sure, you can see the tabs, but the web pages are not actually loaded.
This should be considered a bug, not a feature. Users should be given a choice between rebooting right away or doing it later.
I don’t remember any other browser infringing like this on its users, not even Google Chrome. But somehow Mozilla eggheads thought that this is a good “feature” to add to their open source browser.
No, Mozilla! This is not a feature. This is a bug and should be fixed. You just cannot annoy your users like this otherwise they will be forced to use alternate browsers like Brave or Vivaldi and of course, Chrome.
I end my rant and leave the field open for you. What do you think of these forced restarts by Mozilla Firefox?
Update: Several readers have mentioned that it’s because Ubuntu updates Firefox in the background. But from what I know, Ubuntu also patches other browsers in the background. I see no forced restart in other browsers.
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