Extension to Sourav Goswami's answer:
Under macOS 12.2 "Monterey" I found out that Firefox 96.0.2 replaces the carefully crafted distribution/policies.json
file. This happened even if I set the permissions of this file read-only (444
).
It seems, however, that if I additionally make the containing distribution
directory read-only (permissions 555
), then it helps a little: in this case Firefox adds some more settings to the policies.json
file but at least leaves the "DisableAppUpdate": true
stanza intact. OTOH the permissions of the distribution
directory are reset to 755
, i.e. root
can write to it again.
This is what I have in my policies.json
file after all this:
{
"policies" :
{
"DisableAppUpdate" : true,
"ExtensionSettings" :
{
"[email protected]" :
{
"install_url" : "file:///opt/snow/FFCloudmetering.xpi",
"installation_mode" : "blocked"
}
}
}
}
Which is deeply disturbing, because indeed the /opt/snow
directory is present on my machine, it contains a snowagent
, and it's quite obvious that Firefox installed this garbage behind my back.
I am not sure I'd like to have Firefox any more on my machine. The only problem is that some websites don't work properly with Safari. But that's a topic for another thread, so I stop here.
Please feel free to comment if you saw this behaviour on other platforms. Thanks.
Update (bad pun intended): The "policies" trick doesn't work, this morning Firefox started nagging me again with its oh-so-important update. OTOH the policies.json
file, which is still read-only, now contains only this:
{
"policies" :
{
"DisableAppUpdate" : true,
}
}
at least the "snow" thingy is gone.
Second update: Firefox 98.0.1 simply deleted the distribution
directory and today I was nagged yet again because 98.0.2 is now available, hooray. My next attempt to fight Mozilla was to lock both the distribution
directory and the policies.json
file within it with the chflags uchg <file>
command. Looks good, Firefox claims that updates have been disabled by the system administration. We'll see how long that lasts.
Third update: After installing Firefox 99.0.1, this time under MacOS 11.6.3 "Big Sur" and creating the distribution/policies.json
directory, all was quiet until today (2022-05-10) when I was greeted with the following message:

And all this despite the Firefox Preferences settings still make me believe that updates are disabled:

No, I don't want to spend my time babysitting Firefox and ranting about it on superuser.com
:-)
Desperately looking for a solution that stops these unnecessary updates.