I know the add-ons would stop working, that's why I had a perfectly good FF 52 running which was supposed not to upgrade. The fact that it did (on all three of my machines, no less) caused me no end of annoyance. Fortunately I've managed to fix it, at the cost of lots of lost time in the middle of a time critical job.

Oh! I didn't see that in your previous message.

Did you file a bug? I don't understand how your ESR channel could update you to 57 as it's still on 52!

As I wrote elsewhere in this thread, neither do I, chances are that Ubuntu did the upgrade but after I downgraded FF to 52.5 again it did it once more.

So there is really something weird going on there. But it's end of the year and I have a ton of work to do not related to debugging browser issues so it will have to wait until I have some spare time.

But thank you for caring, it really means a lot to me.

Oh, btw: backwards compatibility is a thing that most users appreciate.

Is there a chance you're not on esr channel on Ubuntu?

This is the channel that stays on ESR - https://launchpad.net/~jonathonf/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-esr

Hope it'll work for you and I apologize for the incident!

Thank you I will look into this. The way my machines were installed is stock Ubuntu and then Firefox ESR from this link:

https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-esr-latest-ssl...

That went into a separate directory (~/ff/) with a symlink from /usr/bin/firefox to /myhome/ff/firefox/firefox

After that I locked down all access to mozilla domains to make sure it would not do anything funny again.

I'm not sure where that 'channel' link you put there lives, I assume that's one of the about:config settings?

Possibly it somehow managed to use the settings from the original browser installed with Ubuntu rather than the ones that it came with. That would at least explain the weird upgrade behavior.

edit: located the 'channel' setting it's app.update.channel and it is set to simply 'esr'. But I have no idea what it was in the past, this is a completely fresh installation in my homedir.

Thank you for all your time, I have to go to sleep now.

At the risk of sounding like a Linux snob, there is a right way and a wrong way to do package management in Linux. Installing binaries into your home directory then linking them to a system directory isn't the right way, unless it absolutely can't be avoided. Not surprised this happened -- use the package management system that comes with your distribution, especially if you have special requirements on maintaining certain versions.

While you're technically right :), it's pretty common for people to discover this the hard way.

It sounds like jacquesm's hit that point, unfortunately at a time critical spot. Probably won't happen twice though. :)

Thinking about this a bit more, it almost sounds like the Ubuntu supplied Firefox (in the base system) was updated to v57, and likely overwrote the /usr/bin/firefox link.

If that's the case, then the manually downloaded v52 ESR is probably still in /myhome/ff/firefox/firefox.

jacquesm, when you have time to check... see if you can launch the version in /myhome/ff/firefox/firefox directly (instead of using the /usr/bin/firefox link). It'd be interesting to see which version is in there. :)

I realise the timeline is a bit confusing by now but here is the complete sequence:

- install Ubuntu - remove OS supplied Firefox package - install Firefox ESR - have a 'surprise upgrade' - re-install Firefox ESR - have another 'surprise upgrade' - install Firefox ESR in my homedir - symlink it from /usr/bin

So now if it pulls any other tricks I can restore the symlink and call it a day, but for now it looks as if that last move did the trick because since I did that (and dropped all FF domains in through /etc/hosts) it has not done any more upgrades, though there is a chance that it attempted to do that.

The one saving grace in the whole story is that at least the plug-ins that got forcibly removed/disabled had their data survive the whole ordeal.

No worries. :)

I did that after the whole thing went South in the first place. So yes, obviously that's not the way to do things by default. But it's a useful way to override package management and auto-upgrade trickery. Worst case now if it happens again (which I really hope it will not) I have to restore one symlink.

FWIW my FF 56 was set to "ask before upgrade" but it didn't and I got FF 57 crammed down my throat anyway.

So much for those plugins which can't be ported because the required WebExtensions API doesn't exist.

Not very pleased about that.

> I doubt we could have done anything more to not make it sudden for you.

It should have been a new-window snippet. Depending on users to read blogs is living by hope. They should have put the news in their faces, unavoidably.