A new Firefox 4 Beta is out, and users looking to update may have noticed that the “Check for Updates” menu item no longer there. That’s because the Firefox updater has been moved to the About Firefox window.
To check for updates in Firefox 4, open the Firefox menu (or Help menu if you have the menu bar enabled), and click on About Firefox.
The About Firefox window will open and Firefox will automatically check for an update. If there is one available, Firefox will automatically download it.
When the download is finished, just click on Apply Update.
Chris, if you need to make a blog article to explain this, it means the feature is probably too well hidden. When it moved from the About menu, I found it myself by pure chance. It means that people DISABLING automatic search of updates won’t find easily how to trigger a manual one…
I agree, if it needs a blog post to explain, it’s a bad idea. This looks like a terrible UE decision.
Ugh, I wouldn’t have found it without this blog post. Horrible UI decision!
It’s in the same location as Chrome.
Not that Chrome is a monument to perfect UI.
Its an odd and not discoverable location, for people already familar with the previous UI, but an interesting merge of concepts since the about dialog is the only location where the current version is shown anyway.
The UI makes sense to me — most people will have automatic updates on and won’t even need to see it.
LOL
Funny to see I’m not the only one cares about this. XD
I did what you said, but still can’t tell if it was updated or not. Thanks, Kathy
Hey, Chris, I found it. It was up-to-date. Thanks for the info on here–it helps me a lot since I am not so computer savvy, as you can tell.:)
Yup – I found it, but only due to this blog – thanks!
20 years in IT, and they still managed to hide it somewhere I didn’t think of looking. Bad choice.
Also, I got a warning that something was preventing Firefox from updating securely when it was left loaded over the weekend. But when I went to the about page and it checked, there was no such warning, it just checked and found nothing to do.
Is it just me, or do others find themselves going to “HELP” and with the split second delay on popping up the submenu clicking, as with apps where you need to to get the submenu, and getting that help window in a browser tab?
The groupings ,you want Add-ons, you click.
You want options, you click.
You want to manually update Aurora or Nightly each day, you go to help, and in that split second, you click.
Not a big thing. But little things sometimes annoy.
In a lot of app groupings there seems trending to uniformity. The update on the about popup being an example, where I do not think the pdf readers do that.
And in the other pdf readers tracking Adobe, they load in more and more annotation features, not one allowing you to set a download destination preference. I think all browsers, even IE, allow that in options. And the config is “options” for browsers; “preferences” for pdf software.