pending update of "firefox" snap Close the app to avoid disruptions

Question

Recently appears this warning when open FireFox:

pending update of "firefox" snap Close the app to avoid disruptions

What does it mean? and what I have to do?

Is this a bug?

Solution 1

As soon as you see the Pending update of "firefox" snap. Close the app to avoid disruptions (13 days left) notification (which means you have 13 days to upgrade Firefox yourself or else the Firefox snap package will get an unattended upgrade) close Firefox and then reopen it after updating the Firefox snap package is finished. If the pending update to the Firefox snap package has not started yet, it can be initiated by running sudo snap refresh. If you don't close Firefox after Firefox has finished being updated, then you will be unable to open any new tabs until you close Firefox and then reopen it.

Solution 2

The above only works if you actually close firefox, otherwise the snap will not refresh, and running snap refresh will not even tell that it held an update back.

The formula that worked for me:

killall firefox;
sudo snap refresh;

But the user experience sucks. It was far more slick using apt, and starting firefox on older machines seems quite a lot slower too.

Solution 3

The message says...

Close the app to avoid disruptions

It would be more helpful if it told you to close the app, and leave it closed for a day or so (with the computer running), to allow the pending update to occur in the background. The assumption is that this process, itself, will not be a "disruption".

The faster solution, assuming you're willing to put up with snap shenanigans, is to run snap refresh --list in order to identify any pending updates, then close the associated apps before running sudo snap refresh, then repeat this sequence to make sure you were successful.

Here's a session log, further demonstrating that you can't take snap messages at face value. Hopefully, there's enough hints here to make snap updates more manageable.

$ sudo snap refresh
All snaps up to date.

$ snap refresh --list
Name      Version        Rev   Size   Publisher   Notes
chromium  103.0.5060.53  2020  139MB  canonical✓  -

$ snap refresh --time
timer: 00:00~24:00/4
last: today at 14:55 MDT
next: today at 19:03 MDT

Comments

[Admin]

Alternatively, replace the snap version of Firefox with apt version, so that you control when firefox will update (and it won't interrupt when you are doing some important work).

[Admin]

There are several browsers available in the Software Boutique. Not all of them are managed by snap. One solution that may work for a lot of people is to use Chrome or Brave, etc.

[Admin]

Same for Chromium. Is driving me mad. Related: reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/v3ixag/… | forum.snapcraft.io/t/refresh-app-awareness-call-for-testing/‌​…

[Admin]

just a comment: why can Firefox / Chromium give us a hint of what to do ? Rather than send a totally ambiguous statement out day after day until we have to go out and search for answer. Lack of intelligent documentation is such a waste of time - for everyone.

[Admin]

I,ve done this sequence: Close firefox. Command in Terminal: sudo snap refresh. And now it's Ok

[Admin]

Another example of snap wanting to have some feature without implementing proper UI support. We want Android style permissions, but we won't have Android-style permission prompt popups, we'll make you dig through settings to find out what's wrong. We want to force you to close the app to allow an update, but we won't detect that the app closed and update visibly automatically, go do it yourself in a terminal.

[Admin]

It's true, Google is usually very good with user interface features. Ubuntu developers could learn a lot from Google.

[Admin]

I'm also running into this, and even though sudo snap refresh seems to fix it, i wonder what the intended behavior is and why it doesn't work. I generally keep things up to date and a restart of firefox definitely doesn't resolve this issue.

[Admin]

To spell this out, sudo snap refresh while firefox is running shows no snaps to update, run it after killall firefox and it does update.

[Admin]

What is the meaning of the "X days remaining" warning? After that many days it stops notifying? Or it forces something?

[Admin]

@user272901 As soon as you see the "X days remaining" warning (which means you have X days to upgrade Firefox yourself or else the Firefox snap package will get an unattended upgrade) immediately close Firefox, open the terminal, run sudo snap refresh and you're done! The Firefox snap package is now upgraded to the latest version.

[Admin]

I believe that this is not really answer to the problem, just workaround. Application should be updated seamlessly without disrupting user workflow. Do you know if there is a bug?

[Admin]

The "killall" element solved my issue

[Admin]

@ĽubomírMlích If this is to be reported to Launchpad as a bug it should be noted that the "X days remaining" warning notification is not unique to the Firefox snap package. This notification may also appear for a pending updates of other snap packages. In other words the updates to snap packages should be applied seamlessly globally.

[Admin]

On the plus side (assuming you have enough expertise to deal with this successfully) these popups make it more obvious when your browser(s) need to be patched.

[Admin]

Is there any reason why the update isn't performed/pre-staged in the background? The message made me assume that the new version is already installed and once I close and restart Firefox, I'll be running the new version. Isn't this exactly what snap should allow (keeping the old version while its running while also installing the new version)?

[Admin]

@JanSchejbal I've seen both cases. To be absolutely sure that Firefox is updated to the latest version you can run sudo snap refresh firefox

[Admin]

I got a similar notification about another application. I then gave the command sudo snap refresh, which yielded the output All snaps up to date. Only after I'd closed the offending application, and tried the refresh command again, was the application updated. Very odd.