How to Disable Automatic Updates in Firefox?

By default, Firefox checks if updates are available and downloads and installs the updates when available. This all goes on silently without your knowledge once Automatic Updates is turned on in Firefox. However you may want to do the updates manually or atleast get notified of the installations before they happen.

You can choose to either turn off these updates completely or get notified before they are installed. Updates in Firefox happen for the browser application, ‘Installed Add-ons‘ and ‘Search Engines‘. While it is highly recommended to keep the automatic updates ‘ON’ in order to get important security fixes on time, you can still disable automatic updates if you want to so.

1. On the Firefox menu bar, select ‘Tools‘ –> ‘Options‘.
2. Click the ‘Advanced‘ icon.
3. Click on ‘Update‘ tab. The auto-update options are displayed.

To completely turn off automatic updates, uncheck all the 3 options (refer image below).

If you wish Firefox to check and prompt for any new updates, but not automatically download and install them, select ‘Ask me what I want to do‘ radio button.

Firefox will prompt you that new updates for Program/add-on/Search Engines is available and gives you an option to download and install them.