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Firefox locks access to open tabs requests restart for update

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My Firefox user experience has massively deteriorated recently.

It has started to reqiure a restart on background update. Sometimes is was really breaking my work "flow" because I have to restore all the open tabs anew. Very frustrating experience but at least I could save what was in those tabs if needed.

This time the background update has locked the Firefox completely, so I could not even access the open tabs. This makes working with Firefox borderline dangerous in regard to loosing my user input information on those tabs.

I know this may be driven by the update mechanics of the distribution (Ubuntu) but this is not acceptable. How can we make sure the update is done on my (user) schedule and not forced on me destroying my information?

My Firefox user experience has massively deteriorated recently. It has started to reqiure a restart on background update. Sometimes is was really breaking my work "flow" because I have to restore all the open tabs anew. Very frustrating experience but at least I could save what was in those tabs if needed. This time the background update has locked the Firefox completely, so I could not even access the open tabs. This makes working with Firefox borderline dangerous in regard to loosing my user input information on those tabs. I know this may be driven by the update mechanics of the distribution (Ubuntu) but this is not acceptable. How can we make sure the update is done on my (user) schedule and not forced on me destroying my information?

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Did you get your Firefox from Mozilla? If not,

Download Firefox For All languages And Systems {web link}

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If you lost personal data then it is possible that a new default-release profile folder has been created. See "Determine if Firefox has created a new profile":

You can open the about:profiles page via the location bar to check whether multiple profiles are present and what profile Firefox currently is using.

Firefox 67 and later can use a dedicated profile for each of the Firefox update channels and will lock the profile, so it can only be used by Firefox in a specific installation folder. For Release versions this profile would be a xxxxxxxx.default-release profile, profiles used in older Firefox versions usually used a xxxxxxxx.default profile (a refresh adds a time stamp).

If you have issues with accessing a profile then try to rename/remove compatibility.ini in this profile folder with Firefox closed.