All the modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome have an auto-update feature and they keep updating themselves automatically whenever an update is available. Basically this involves the downloading of the new setup file and installing it in the background. But sometimes the Firefox update does not work because the installer fails to run properly and hangs up. If you cannot install or update Firefox normally using its setup installer, then you can update it manually. Here is how :
You must have administrator access to update Firefox in your computer.
- Download the latest version of Firefox setup from http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/. The downloaded file would have a name like Firefox Setup 15.0.exe.
- Download and install 7-Zip archiver from http://www.7-zip.org/.
- Close all the running instances of Firefox.
- Open the %ProgramFiles% folder which is usually C:\Program Files. To open this folder, press hotkey Win + R, type %ProgramFiles% in the Run dialog and press Enter. Inside the %ProgramFiles% there would be a subfolder named Mozilla Firefox. Rename this folder from Mozilla Firefox to Mozilla Firefox.old.
- Right-click on the Firefox installer file you downloaded in Step 1 and select 7-Zip → Extract to from the right-click context menu as shown in the following picture.
This would extract the contents of the setup installer file to a folder of the same name. There would be a subfolder named Core inside it. Copy this Core folder to %ProgramFiles% (that you opened in Step 4 above).
- Inside %ProgramFiles%, rename the subfolder named Core to Mozilla Firefox.
- That’s it. You have updated Mozilla Firefox. Now you can start updated version of Firefox from its desktop shortcut.