Firefox displays the message "Firefox is being updated by another instance" in the "About Mozilla Firefox" dialog
this issue was first noticed on Ubuntu 22.04 after updating to Firefox 134.0.0 and is consistently reproducible
the issue is gating the ability for Firefox to receive notifications about available software updates
the message persists after all of the following events:
1. after closing / quitting Firefox
2. after manually updating to Firefox 134.0.1
3. after completely removing the entire ~/.mozilla/ directory structure and reinstalling Firefox 134.0.1
additionally, a broken symlink file appears in the profile directory:
for example:
ls -la ~/.mozilla/firefox/profoobar.default-release/lock
example results:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 foouser foouser 22 Jan 18 12:53 /home/foouser/.mozilla/firefox/profoobar.default-release/lock -> 123.45.67.89:+765432
* profoobar is the profile directory and 765432 is the PID of the process for /opt/firefox/firefox
although it is possible to delete the broken symlink, the file reappears each time Firefox is restarted:
rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/profoobar.default-release/lock
deleting the .parentlock file also has no effect:
rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/profoobar.default-release/.parentlock
