I need to update my browser and I see:
"Updates disabled by your system administrator"
Mint Virtualbox
Mozilla Firefox for Linux Mint 001 -1.0

Literally your thread title in a search engine.

I read it and the conclusion is to use the update manager within Mint?

I clicked the update manager icon in mint and I see "a new version of the update manager is available" I don't see anything that says "update firefox" within Update Manager box, and I am not keen to update the Update Manager unless its a must.Clear, Select All, Install updates are all greyed out. Can it be solved if I used synaptic to update firefox? Or apt install update firefox? Apparently I need to be in root to do the update within Update Manager, not sure how that is possible since Update Manager is a GUI?


(Quotes from others)The reason appears to be:
"Mozilla only provides internal Firefox updates for the official builds of desktop Firefox (for Linux, Windows and macOS) from https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/.Third-party builds like those installed from a package repository for a Linux distro do not get internal Firefox updates."

"Note that “mint-001” and “1.0” are not the version of Firefox. They don’t relate to the packaging version either. They just represent identifiers of Linux Mint within Firefox.
The version of Firefox appears lower, “95.0.1” in this screenshot."

"In Linux Mint the Update Manager is responsible for all software updates, and applying updates requires root privileges.

“Your browser is being managed by your organization” might look a bit scary but all it means is that Firefox was told to not worry about updating itself.In the About dialog, “Updates disabled by your system administrator” has the same meaning."

"...updates have been disabled by a system wide policy or autoconfig file.
The about policies page should confirm that a policy that disables updates is active."

"Firefox will continue to be distributed as .deb packages through the official Linux Mint repositories."

I followed the suggestion to use Update Manager as per this article Linux Mint forum.I was forced to update Update Manager within Mint first, so I did.

Now within Update Manager, I don't see anything saying "click here to update firefox", instead I see a long list of stuff like:
bash
libjcat
mint-common
mint-mirrors
samba
ubuntu-drivers-common etc

far too many to mention, no mention however of firefox in the list.

I took a peek at Synaptic Manager and I see green boxes checked for firefox but nothing saying 'click this to update firefox' either.

Sounds like you didn't update for a while. You definitely should.

Linux Mint uses a unique update mechanism, I'm not sure you should circumvent it by using another apt frontend.

2 members found this post helpful.

Hey linux-man,

Reading through this thread, I am left with the impression that Mozilla makes a "self-updating" version of Firefox that won't "self-update" on Mint (guessing here, because I don't regularly use Firefox and have no personal experience with such a feature).

In my view, this is a good thing. If at all possible, in my experience, it is always preferable to manage updates of any software on a Linux system through its package management system.

Also, I concur with ondoho - I would perform regular system updates to ensure you don't run into any obsolescence or dependency issues.

So if after updating your system, Mint is not reporting a new version of Firefox, I would just leave things as they are until it does.

Cheers,

Rick

I updated the update manager,updated included firefox, there is a green check box next to " firefox browser new version 100.0 +linuxmint1+una".

Yet firefox still says "updates disabled by system admin"

Hey linux-man,

I went over your previous posts here - some of your research reveals that the "updates disabled by your system administrator" type messages are normal in the case of Firefox. I admit that it is not intuitive and it would have been preferable for the package manager to find a more elegant way to manage releases, but the bottom line seems to be that you can ignore those messages. Your package management system (Mint's Update Manager) will download and install an updated package for Firefox once it is available.

I am assuming that you installed Firefox through your package manager, of course, and not from a package obtained directly from the Mozilla / Firefox site. If you did do that, please confirm and we can perhaps suggest another course of action.

Cheers,

Rick

1 members found this post helpful.

I updated Firefox through Update Manager not with Synaptic Manager in Mint.

OK that's fine. I am not a Mint user, but from my use of AntiX (a Debian derivative), I believe both Update Manager and Synaptic are GUI front-ends for the apt package management system of Mint. Sounds like you're all set.

Cheers,

Rick