The Secret to Getting the Firefox Auto-Updates You Want

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Apparently it’s not a secret, though neither I, nor my friend who asked me to look into it, knew about it. She got updated to Firefox 1.5.0.1 through the auto-update feature that is new in 1.5. But 1.5.0.1 wasn’t officially available when she got it (1.5.0.1 was released yesterday). So how did she get it?

If you installed Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 or Beta 2 and then used the auto-update system to move to the 1.5 final release, your update “channel” would be beta and the update system would download betas. To determine if this is the case, check the file “firefox install” (whatever that is)\defaults\prefs\channel-prefs.js.

line 2 is pref(”app.update.channel”, “beta”); if you are on the beta channel
line 2 is pref(”app.update.channel”, “release”); if you are on the release channel

We Say: So, if you decide you want to switch to the other channel, simply make the appropriate change to the file, save it and restart Firefox. Pretty easy, but pretty mysterious if you don’t know about it.