I recently switched from Brave to Firefox. Just because Brave appeared to be some proprietary shit, even though they're masking themselves as FOSS - no, they don't. It took me a while to finally realize this fact. So God only knows what kind of spyware they have built into their "very secure web browser".
It did, though, one good feature - a built-in TOR router, so you could spin-off a new "secure" tab by pressing [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+[T] and that would have opened a new tab while trying to start a TOR router. But that doesn't work well. If for whatever reason the built-in TOR doesn't want to startup, you don't even have an option to kick it in the back to try it once again. Only to close the tab and open a new one. User experience is on the shittiest level of fresh-graduate-the-very-first-piece-of-software.
So enough moaning about Brave. This time we're gonna moan about Firefox. It looks like, it has this idiotic feature built-in into itself to somehow update itself. And when it does that, it puts a stick you right into your eye by showing this text for all the new tabs you'll try to open:
Restart to Keep Using Firefox
An update to Firefox started in the background. You’ll need to restart to finish the update.
Your windows and tabs will be quickly restored, but private ones will not.
I was not quite sure how this kind of automatic update is supposed to work first of all. Because I was assuming, when you have Firefox installed as package via your package manager on Linux, and when you're running it as unprivileged user, it cannot just go and update itself. Because to update itself it needs to update its own binaries, which are part of the deployed package, and doing that behind package manager just screws the whole idea of package manager administering your software. And also it cannot just go and update binaries, because Firefox processes are executed under unprivileged user (your user), but binaries belong to your local root user.
So for me the solution is quite simple - to remove Firefox snap package and install it as normal Deb package from Firefox repo:
# remove any traces of firefox
snap remove firefox
apt remove firefox
# add Mozilla repo
add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
# make sure the repo we have just added will have a priority over all other repos
echo '
Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001
' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox
# install firefox
sudo apt install firefox
Just in case I also found some older answer about few hidden configuration options in Firefox, not sure how relevant they are + people are claiming it's no longer working for them:
Go to 'about:config' and type in 'app.update' and you'll see a long list of configurable values. One of these is 'app.update.auto', which you can set to be FALSE, which should disable auto-updating alltogether.
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