With the last several releases of Firefox and Thunderbird, I have enabled automatic notification of new releases. When I'm notified, the window that pops up has a button saying that lets you upgrade. However, this button doesn't seem to work for me when I click it. This was the same from when I first switched to Linux when it was Firefox 4 or 5 up until the current release of 7 and 8.

The only way to upgrade is to delete the installation files and in its place extract the contents of the new archive file downloaded from Mozilla with the latest Firefox or Thunderbird release.

Am I doing something wrong, or is there really no nice way of one-click upgrading or upgrading at all through the user interface? (Does that only work on Windows systems?) If so I'm surprised they keep that upgrade button on the Linux version of the window popup that informs you of a new version, because it gets users hopes up unnecessarily

How to best upgrade can vary depending on the distribution, but most distributions will handle it with the distro updates through their own package management. If your distro has not updated, then getting a package that works with your distributions package managment (eg. on RHEL get a .rpm) of the version you want to install and using that should work.
you can also get a source tarball and compile the version yourself and keep track of it on your own, but that's probably not worth the trouble.

Something I just happened to stumble upon with Firefox and Thunderbird on PuppyLinux- Open the Help menu and select About... In the top right corner it should say "You are on the release update channel", and either "XX is up-to-date" or "Downloading updates". If it is downloading updates, it will automatically install them as well.

Hope this helps.

It is possible that you cannot upgrade firefox and thunderbird as a regular user, since you (normally) don't have write permissions to necessary directories. I remember when I was using Slackware 12.0 the update button was greyed-unclickable. I had to login as root to update firefox. Now on Gentoo with firefox 7 I can't even locate an update button. So you probably have to update it through your package manager.

If it was installed using your distros package manager it needs to be upgraded the same way.

If you downloaded it from Mozilla and upgraded it in the past you should have no problem upgrading it normally.

Help>About Firefox and it should check for updates.

Attached Thumbnails

 

I didn't install it using the package manager. Simply installed it by extracting the archive I downloaded from mozilla and running /path/to/firefox.

This could be it. I'll wait until Firefox/Thunderbird asks me to upgrade again, then I'll close Firefox/Thunderbird and start them again with 'sudo /path/to/firefox' and 'sudo /path/to/thunderbird' and try updating from About > Help. I'm expecting that should no work because of root permissions. Once that is done, I'll close the programs, then start them normally (without sudo) and it should have upgraded.

Marking thread solved, I'll reopen it and post again if this doesn't work the next time I need to upgrade. (It's good to know that it is in fact possible to update from the GUI in the Linux versions of Firefox/Thunderbird - I was thinking it wasn't.)