Moz Update Checker is a WebExtension Manifest V2 add-on intended to check for Mozilla browser updates. Due to the rapidly evolving technological security landscape, browser updates are essential in our modern age. But not all operating systems/configurations permit timely automatic updates and this add-on can especially benefit these circumstances.
Available on the Mozilla Firefox Add-on repository here.
This extension is particularly useful for AppImage, Portable, Tarball, and manually compiled installations. Once installed, and when the browser is opened in the future, the current version is compared with the latest available version. If a new version is detected, both a desktop notification and a new tab (by default) will open to display update information.
Updates will then continue to be checked in the background every 12 hours by default. Results are cached to reduce network activity but clicking the status image on the status page can force a refresh. Failed network connections are automatically retried 3 times before reaching a failure state.
The present state is reflected via toolbar icon. Single click of the toolbar icon opens the add-on pop-up view and middle-click opens the tab page. Settings and links are also available as links from these pages.
Alert type and Alert schedule are both customizable.
| Alert type | Description |
|---|---|
| New Tab | Opens only a new tab |
| Notification | Sends only a desktop notification |
| Both | Opens both types |
| Disabled | Disables all notifications |
| Alert Schedule | Description |
|---|---|
| Frequency | 4 Hours to 3 Days frequency |
| Disabled | Disables the alarm scheduler |
- Firefox Latest - Checks product-details.mozilla.org
- Firefox ESR - ESR support is automatically detected by comparing each release version, this may become problematic in the future
- IceCat - For IceCat we parse the commit atom feed, may also break in the future
- LibreWolf - Reads the GitLab API for release builds
No data is collected nor stored by the author. Some information including origin IP address and add-on extension HTTP request headers are required to be transmitted to remote API/Git endpoints in order to poll for release updates. These endpoints include:
- Firefox: "https://product-details.mozilla.org/1.0/firefox_versions.json"
- LibreWolf: "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/44042130/releases.json"
- IceCat: "https://gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnuzilla.git;a=atom"
The author cannot be held liable for the data collection policy instituted by the server administrators of the aforementioned addresses. Privacy and security are highly valued and important to the author. This extension will always remain transparent and open-source.
LibreWolf Update Alerter by Sam St-Pettersen and update-notifier by Manuel Reimer
Thanks to Mozilla for bucking the dominance of Google's Chrome (and advertisement friendly Manifest V3). The SVG status icons are based on the progress-* series by tabler-icons, MIT License combined with CoreUI's Cib-mozilla-firefox, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. LICENSE (modified to change the size and color).
.svg){kind=link}
Generative "AI" is/was not used to "Vibe code" this project but (local) open-source and open-weight LLMs are employed for knowledge and summarization, mostly for commit logs.