LibreWolf is mostly a bunch of policies. If you go into the preferences pane, you should see a note: 'Your browser is being managed by your organization'. When you click the link, there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like telemetry, auto-updates etc. It also has the about:config section heavily tweaked and modified.

Doing all that on stock Firefox is a lot of work which is why I prefer the developers of LibreWolf to do it for me. Call me lazy if you want.

There is the added benefit of new Firefox features getting stripped in later releases of LibreWolf that otherwise would have gone un-noticed by me. Also: Trimming down the browser traffic and stopping it from being really chatty with Mozilla servers is great (if you don't like Mozilla for whatever reason).

> there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like […] auto-updates

YIKES. Automatic updates are incredibly important for security. Disabling them by default is highly concerning.

Does the browser support (manual) self-updates at all, or has that functionality been disabled entirely?

Some of us are responsible software owners who prefer to update on our own terms.

I understand the argument that my grandmother should probably enable auto-updates, because otherwise she could easily end up months behind on releases.

But I care deeply about my personal computing environment. I notice every minuscule change because I'm on my computer for hours and hours each day. Sometimes I'm in the middle of some important projects and I don't want anything to automatically update. Sometimes I'm really productive during an afternoon and I don't want to waste time and lose momentum on an update (or some bug, or UI change, as a result of that update). Sometimes I've heard about some problem coming down the pipe in the next update and I'd rather wait until there's mitigations to make that change work better with my specific setup.

Automatic updates basically assume that I have the computing proficiency of my grandmother. But I actually manage my computer in a very conscious, thoughtful way. All software should provide the ability to disable automatic updates (and update nagging) out of respect for power users. It's OK to hide it in a developer or advanced menu. Just give me the option.

That being said: automatic updates are a sensible default for the same reason. But let me opt out, and (Mozilla, are you listening?) for the love of god please don't override my preferences back to automatic updates when you decide to change the UI of preferences.

> But let me opt out

It seems to me that you can opt out. You can use the "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" setting in `about:preferences`. Or you can use the exact policy currently under discussion: `DisableAppUpdate`. Or there is another policy called `ManualAppUpdateOnly` [0].

> (Mozilla, are you listening?)

Why yes, we are listening. We have heard many people request the ability to disable automatic updates, which is why we have the options that I mentioned above. If you feel that these options don't meet your needs, we would really appreciate you filing a bug [1]. We will get to it fastest if you put it in the correct component (which for this issue is `Toolkit::Application Update`).

> for the love of god please don't override my preferences back to automatic updates when you decide to change the UI of preferences.

I'm guessing that you are referring to when we removed the "Never install updates" setting [2]? This wasn't fundamentally a UI change. We had several good reasons to remove the underlying pref. Naturally, that meant that the UI for that pref went away as well. I won't spend a lot of time getting into our reasoning here, but we would be happy to discuss it with you if you want to chat with us about it. You can find us in the `#install-update:mozilla.org` channel on https://chat.mozilla.org

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/#manualappupdate... [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/home [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1420514