Firefox will use Windows BITS service for background updates

In the near future, Mozilla Firefox will use Windows Windows Intelligent Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to support downloading the installation of software updates in the background. This is the first step in the process of launching an independent release "Update Agent" - which can happen even if the browser is not being launched.

Currently Mozilla Firefox will check for new updates when users open the browser, then send a notification that a new update is available, or automatically install the update.

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Update Firefox

To make it easier for users to receive updates, especially for people who don't use Firefox regularly, Mozilla developers have begun building a standalone application written in Rust. named 'Update Agent'. This application will quietly operate to monitor new browser updates even if Firefox is not active on the system:

'Update Agent is scheduled as a background process, which means that the application will remain active after the user closes the browser, thereby helping to download and apply updates more conveniently to those do not use Firefox often, nor save time to receive new updates for users who do not receive appropriate support from the current update process (do not use Firefox continuously or own slow, unstable internet connection '.

Besides, according to experts, this update method will also help Firefox become more secure, because even if users install the update immediately when prompted, there is a chance to The security vulnerability was exploited before the update process was completed and an additional security fix was installed.

When the update is ready, Firefox will create a Windows scheduled task (Windows task scheduler). This task will be used to execute Update Agent at different intervals to check for available updates and download those updates.

Although it is convenient, Update Agent pulls an unexpected problem, that is, the background application consumes system resources. Hopefully Update Agent will be optimized by Mozilla effectively to not cause too much impact on the overall performance of the system.

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Mozilla will use BITS to update the new version

For Windows users, Mozilla will use BITS as the main method to download new software updates for Firefox. The main reason is that BITS allows updates to be downloaded in a recoverable way in case the download process is forced to pause, or suddenly interrupted for some reason. . This allows updates to continue to download seamlessly when seamlessly connecting again, which saves considerable time compared to having to update from the beginning as it is now.

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Currently Mozilla is activating BITS in Firefox so that the browser can begin to apply this service during the process of downloading new updates, because Update Agent is not yet ready to put into actual use and there are a few Other errors need to be addressed:

'Mozilla will allow Firefox to update with BITS without having to use Update Agent as a stepping stone to release the perfect version of this application. At the same time, using BITS will also allow us to easily switch from this download mechanism to another download mechanism instead of using only one limit per update.

Currently, Firefox will launch BITS through a built-in binary interface. This interface has a direct contact role with BITS, but will be designed so that in the future it can communicate with BITS using the Update Agent as an intermediate application. This will allow it to manage BITS tasks as a Local Service user, which is how we want the process of updating Firefox to take place when Update Agent downloads a new version. independence".

In the current Firefox Nightly build, Mozilla has added two new flags that can be used to check the process of downloading software updates through BITS. Users can enable this check process by setting the app.update.BITSenables and app.update.BITS.inTrialgroup options to true in about: config.

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Firefox BITS options

Mozilla developers are actively completing this project, so it's likely that we will soon experience the complete version in the near future.