Why doesnt firefox auto download latest version - opinion
A couple versions back, I started getting this pop-up message each morning, "Firefox can't update to the latest version". I downloaded a newer version and upgraded manually a couple times, now up to , and the pop-up keeps happening. I see a couple other people have reported a similar problem, one here was blown off because they were, supposedly, running a beta version. I'm not running beta. The other one I found was fixed by doing something to the registry, but I'm on Linux, not MS Windows so there's no registry (at least none that I know about).
The one other symptom I've noticed is that when I bring up the "About Firefox" window, it takes a really long time to figure out that "Firefox is up to date". And it always says it's up to date (if I wait long enough) even when there's a newer version available.
It would be greatly helpful if that pop-up would say *why* it couldn't update itself but it does not give any useful information.
Thanks for any help on this.
Chosen solution
Looks like I found the problem, sort of. Anyway, I wanted to document it for the next time someone runs across this. The short answer is that it was DNS related.
I was cued in on this because of that clue that bringing up the About Firefox window took a long time to decide that my Firefox was up-to-date (even when it was not up to date). It looked like a timeout of some sort, so I got to thinking about networking problems.
I changed my DNS server to and it came right up, downloaded an update, and everything was good. I changed my DNS server back to my ISP's DNS server and it still works. My speculation is that somehow I got a bad DNS response that was cached and that was getting me stuck all these months. I can't say if that bad information was from someone maliciously trying to take over the Firefox update path (is that a thing?), the update server changed IP address and I was stuck using the old address, or just something weird.
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