hello, it's planned that the mozilla maintenance service will once be able to apply update for users with limted rights, however it is not implemented at the current stage. at the moment it is only used avoiding the UAC popups in windows 7 on every update. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Windows_Service_Silent_Update#Limite...

thanks madperson. im guessing the only way around this will be to grant the users some maybe write access to c:\program files (x86)\mozilla folder in order to allow someone without admin right to install the update. do you know if that might work?

yes, the auto updates should work in this case - for detailed information about the update process you also can consult https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update (have look at the links at the bottom of the page too).