How to solve "Pending update of "firefox" snap. Close the app to avoid disruptions" error?

Question

Recently, this warning appears when open Firefox:

Pending update of "firefox" snap

Close the app to avoid disruptions

What does it mean? And what do I have to do? Is this a bug?

Answer 1

If you have received a notification of a pending Firefox update it will appear as a small bell icon next to the clock in the top panel. Clicking on the bell will show a Firefox pending update notification as shown in the below screenshot.

As soon as you see the Pending update of "firefox" snap. Close the app to avoid disruptions (13 days left) notification (which means you have 13 days to upgrade Firefox yourself or else the Firefox snap package will get an unattended upgrade) close Firefox and then reopen it after updating the Firefox snap package is finished. If the pending update to the Firefox snap package has not started yet, it can be initiated by running sudo snap refresh. If you don't close Firefox after Firefox has finished being updated, then you will be unable to open any new tabs until you close Firefox and then reopen it.

When the Firefox snap package has been updated a notification will appear that Firefox was updated and is ready to launch.

Another noteworthy feature of pending updates for Firefox is that they can be installed automatically without user interaction. For example, I have closed Firefox, locked the screen, and left the computer for a few minutes, and then when I came back I received a notification that a pending update to Firefox had been installed in my absence.

---

The Firefox update notification has changed since this question was asked. Now it looks like this.

The bottom notification says that Software updates are available to be downloaded. When I ignore this notification on my Ubuntu 22.04 the software updates are downloaded automatically. The top and more recent notification says:

Update available for Firefox.
Close the application to update now. It will update.

As soon as I close the Firefox window, Firefox starts to update, and a few seconds later I get another notification that says:

Firefox was updated.
Ready to launch.

The second screenshot in this answer shows an image of this notification which is the third of three Firefox update notifications. I consider these 3-step notifications to be an improvement on the original notification because because when I close Firefox it only takes a few seconds for Firefox to be updated and ready to launch. If I select History -> Restore Previous Session in Firefox, then all my tabs from the previous session come back.

Answer 2

The above only works if you actually close firefox, otherwise the snap will not refresh, and running snap refresh will not even tell that it held an update back.

The formula that worked for me:

killall firefox;
sudo snap refresh;

But the user experience sucks. It was far more slick using apt, and starting firefox on older machines seems quite a lot slower too.

Answer 3

How to disable snap notifications on the Settings UI

This is not ideal as you will miss out on the latest security updates. But if the thing is going to keep annoying me every other day, I can't stand it anymore.

• Settings ("Windows key" and search "Settings")
• Notifications
• Snapd User Session Agent
• Slide Notifications left

Tested on Ubuntu 22.04. Learnt from: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/how-to-disable-snapd-update-notifications-permanently/31117/2

It is not like I leave my laptop on suspend every night, I shut it down every day, thus shutting down the browser, and even then the update is not automatic. That system is just too user unfriendly. Devs need to implement a system that automatically downloads security updates, and that they take effect when you restart the program. A notification should only show e.g. after 24 hours of being outdated.

Bibliography:

• Pending Update of Snap Store
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/v1s919/disable_pending_update_of_snap_message_kiosk/

Answer 4

The message says...

Close the app to avoid disruptions

It would be more helpful if it told you to close the app, and leave it closed for a day or so (with the computer running), to allow the pending update to occur in the background. The assumption is that this process, itself, will not be a "disruption".

The faster solution, assuming you're willing to put up with snap shenanigans, is to run snap refresh --list in order to identify any pending updates, then close the associated apps before running sudo snap refresh, then repeat this sequence to make sure you were successful.

Here's a session log, further demonstrating that you can't take snap messages at face value. Hopefully, there's enough hints here to make snap updates more manageable.

$ sudo snap refresh
All snaps up to date.

$ snap refresh --list
Name      Version        Rev   Size   Publisher   Notes
chromium  103.0.5060.53  2020  139MB  canonical✓  -

$ snap refresh --time
timer: 00:00~24:00/4
last: today at 14:55 MDT
next: today at 19:03 MDT

Answer 5

Firefox deb packages are available from mozillateam PPA.

Shot instructions:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
# raise firefox PPA priority
echo -e 'Package: firefox*\nPin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam\nPin-Priority: 501' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozillateamppa
sudo apt remove firefox
sudo apt install firefox

Remark

The PPA repo has a higher Pin-Priority, but after two days, the snap package was installed again.

I've done the following:

apt list --all-versions firefox
sudo apt install firefox=105.0+build2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1~mt1
sudo apt-mark hold firefox

Update firefox

sudo apt upgrade firefox

Answer 6

Here's an all GUI, app specific solution:

• Close the app in need of updating
• Open the Ubuntu Software app
• Click "Installed" (to list only software already on your machine)
• Click on the app to update
• Click "Update"

Answer 7

There seems to be a bug in the update or update message system (Possibly related to FireFox).

I keep seeing the alert message in the System Messages notification area:

However, there is no actual update for firefox available.

I am running the current version which is available from snap.

If I look in the Snap store it shows there are actually no updates.

However, when I look at the version in the snap store it does display the [Install] button (as if it is not installed).

However, you can see that both versions (107.0.1) are the same.

And yet this message keeps popping up each day. It always says 13 days left also.

Answer 8

If the notification still popups after the suggested killall offending_process_name, try running:

sudo snap refresh [offending_process_name]

Replacing [offending_process_name] for the name of what you are trying to update. If you don't know the name, you can use sudo snap refresh --list to get it.

Why? Because that one will fail too, but it will tell you why it fails for that specific package. It will produce an output similar to this:

Cannot update [offending_process] because it has associated apps running.

And most important, it will tell you the PIDs of the associated processes in the next line. Once you know the PIDs, you can simply run:

sudo kill 44332
sudo kill 55434

Where those numbers are some random PIDs. Replace for the real ones.

Then retry:

sudo snap refresh [offending_app]

or sudo snap refresh and it should work this time.

Real life example: Visual Studio Code seems to spawn processes like Android's ADB, omnisharp, etc. And in some situations it doesn't close them on exit. This result in a peculiar situation. You run killall code, code is the command name to launch Visual Studio Code, and you get that the process isn't running at all. Then you retry sudo snap refresh and it doesn't update code, and just produce the popup saying "you have XX days to...".

It seems like snap tracks the processes launched by snaps even if they aren't snaps themselves (comment on this). The PIDs you pass to kill command may not be snaps. If this is the case, then spawning things from the builtin terminal may too prevent update even when code is not in memory.

Also, if for some reason kill doesn't end those processes you have to force the SIGKILL signal, default is SIGTERM and won't kill bugged processes. See man kill.

Answer 9

Just close Firefox and then run these commands:

sudo snap refresh
sudo snap refresh firefox