The dialog below should look familiar. It displays while Firefox completes the update process after a new version is installed and the browser is restarted.
In order to update itself, Firefox first starts to download an update in the background. When the update is downloaded, Firefox stages it in a directory ready to be applied. The next time that Firefox is about to start up, it checks out the staging directory. If an update ready to be applied is found, Firefox launches the updater program, and applies the update on top of the existing installation (showing that progress bar as it's doing its job). When the update process is finished, the updater program restarts Firefox. All of this happens as you're waiting for your browser to start up in order to do what you wanted to do. This is clearly less than ideal.
For the past few weeks, I have been working on a project to improve this process. The goal of my project is to minimize the amount of time it takes for Firefox to launch after downloading an update. The technical details of how I'm fixing this problem can be found this document. Here's a short version of how the fix works. When Firefox finishes downloading an update, it launches the updater application in the background without displaying any UI, and applies the update in a new directory that is completely separate from the existing installation directory. Instead of staging the update itself, an entire updated version of Firefox is staged. The next time that Firefox starts up, the existing installation is swapped with the new updated installation which is ready to be used. In this scenario, you likely won’t notice that Firefox has applied an update as no UI is shown.
Now, the reason that this approach fixes the problem is that swapping the directories, unlike the actual process of applying the update, is really fast. We are effectively moving the cost of applying the update to right after the update has been downloaded while the browser is running. This leaves only the really fast copy operation to be performed the next time that the browser starts up.
I have some experimental builds with this feature ready in a temporary channel called Ash. The implementation is now at a stage where it can benefit testing from the community. You can download the latest builds here. I will trigger a few nightly builds on this branch every day so that you would get updates if you're running an Ash build.
In order to help with testing this new update process, all you need to do is to download the latest build from Ash, then wait a few hours so that a new nightly build becomes available, and then update to that build. Updating can be triggered manually by opening the About dialog, or by the background update checker if you leave the build running for a few hours. If everything works correctly, when you restart Firefox, you should get a new build without seeing any progress bar as Firefox is starting up. In order to verify that you have indeed been updated to a new build, you can go to about:buildconfig, copy its contents, and then compare it with the contents of about:buildconfig when Firefox starts up after an update.
It would be extremely useful if you can test this with different types of security and anti-virus software running. If you observe any problems or warning, or if you see that the update did not change the contents of about:buildconfig, then please let me know so that I can try to fix those problems.
For people who are curious to see the code, I'm doing my development on this branch, and I'm regularly posting patches on bug 307181.
Please note that this is still in the testing stage, and at this point, we're not quite sure which version of Firefox this will land in (we’re working to land it as soon as is safely possible). No matter which version of Firefox includes this feature for the first time, we believe that this will be a very positive change in making the Firefox update experience more streamlined for all of our users.