Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

how do i stop plug ins from updating

more options

Once or twice a week a box will pop up about updating plugins, then a completely different Firefox browser than I use pops up, there are no bookmarks in this browser, I close it, open my regular Firefox browser and all my bookmarks are gone. How do I stop this updater from doing this?

Once or twice a week a box will pop up about updating plugins, then a completely different Firefox browser than I use pops up, there are no bookmarks in this browser, I close it, open my regular Firefox browser and all my bookmarks are gone. How do I stop this updater from doing this?

All Replies (1)

more options

What does the update window look like? This is the official plugin update site:

https://www.mozilla.org/plugincheck/

Is that it, or something else?

What you're seeing may be generated by an add-on. Try disabling ALL nonessential or unrecognized add-ons on these two tabs:

orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Plugins category
orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons > Extensions category

Usually a link will appear above at least one disabled extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.

If you would like comments on whether any of your extensions look untrustworthy, you can extract a list from the Troubleshooting Information page. Either:

  • Help > Troubleshooting Information
  • type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter

In the upper left corner is a button to "Copy text to clipboard". When pasting into a reply, you'll see a lot of preference information below the extensions list. You can delete that lower part if you don't want comments on those.