Getting Firefox 3.X to update successfully on Vista

For some time now (months, if not years), my Firefox has been unable to update automatically. It keeps erroring out every time it tries to apply the update. Turns out I’m not the only one reporting it, and it’s been around since 2007 at least. You can blame this on Mozilla, or on Microsoft (since here, UAC is definitely a factor). In this case I think we need to blame Mozilla – working around UAC is very well documented and if little tiny startups can figure it out, Mozilla should be able to as well.

The folks at the forum above had the right idea, but you need a variation to get it to work on Vista.

  1. Open an Administrator command prompt
  2. Do
    icacls "c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" /grant Everyone:F /T
  3. This step may not be needed, but I did it anyway: delete the contents of C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox – this is, I think, where the info about the updates gets stored.

Now restart Firefox and it should be able to update itself. Note of course that you’re defeating the purpose of UAC here, but as I said, it’s time to blame Mozilla.

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