Earlier today I had a very strange request come across my inbox. An employee of another organization asked me to explain to her IT department why they were wrong in their assesment of Firefox . It seems that since they can push out Internet Explorer patches via WSUS , but not Firefox patches, they made the assumption that Firefox was less secure than IE.
We’ve all heard the arguments to the contrary over and over – including this article today. But there are still organizations where the thinking is “If the patch can’t be pushed out via WSUS, it isn’t secure.”
I realized, that perhaps there are departments (like the one to which I sent the directions below) that are either unaware of how to automate Firefox patching or are too afraid to install it in the first place to have the chance to figure it out.
No, Firefox patching doesn’t happen through WSUS (at least to my knowledge), but it can be fully automated by:
- Go to “Tools” -> “Options” -> “Advanced”
- Click on the “Update” tab
- Check the boxes labled “Firefox”, “Installed Extensions and Themes”, “Search Engines”, “Automatically download ….” and “Warn me if …”
Click “OK” and you’re done. Automatic updating in Firefox. Who knows, once the market share grows enough, you may be able to push Firefox patches through WSUS. Until then, however, the builtin function works great.
