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I have Firefox Developer Edition 96.0b3 installed on my Debian Bullseye Stable system.

Each time I open up Firefox, I am prompted to download the updated version of Firefox, because it "could not update automatically." It tells me that extracting the downloaded archive to the place where I have my Firefox installed, replacing the old installation, will not modify my preferences or profile. So I did. Then I restarted. Still asking for an update. So I did it again. A yet another time, it asked for an update. After a few times, I understood that the Firefox installation was properly updated, but Firefox doesn't seem to be "aware" of that. How do I "make it know" what version it really is, so that it stops prompting me for an update that was already done?

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  • In which folder did you install?
    – harrymc
    Jan 30, 2022 at 15:47

1 Answer 1

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Cause:

Naturally, installing Firefox using root privileges, in a directory that belongs to root:root, will keep Firefox from being able to update automatically, because it needs those same root privileges every time it wants to change the content of the directory in which it is installed.

Solution:

# chown -R <user>:<user> firefox

As you can see by the opening hashtag, that command obviously needs to be run as root. The above command essentially just changes the ownership of the directory /opt/firefox to the user and group of that same user. The -R flag, which could also have been used in its longer form, --recursive, ensures that all the subdirectories are affected by this change as well. This is important, so make sure you don't leave it out.

P.S. Thank you for the hint, @harrymc.

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