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Would it be a good or bad idea to add a "/MaintenanceService=false" parameter to the Firefox packages? #102

@DandelionSprout

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@DandelionSprout

Over the course of recent days/months depending on the perspective, I've found myself in a peculiar and somewhat escalating situation regarding Firefox and its closely associated Mozilla Maintenance Service. Most of it is documented across https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/pull/361091 (Both the thread and in "Files changed") and in the various other threads/webpages linked to on that page.

From how I understand the situation:

  1. When doing interactive installs of Firefox, users are asked whether to also install Mozilla Maintenance Service or not.
  2. When doing silent installs of Mozilla.Firefox(...), they are not asked, and it automatically installs Mozilla Maintenance Service.
  3. Users who silent installs then have not just 1, but 2 new packages listed in Windows Settings (and in e.g. Geekuninstaller).
  4. Mozilla have practically no documentation of what Maintenance Service is or does, and in fact I can't even find its source code, so I take a qualified guess that a lot of end-users (including me until late last year) are confused by what Maintenance Service is.

Reasons I can see in favour to add

  • Lower chance of Winget end-users ending up confused by what Maintenance Service is, or by how it ended up on their PC.
  • Presuming that end-users plan to use Winget to update Firefox, a UAC bypasser like Maintenance Service is presumably less important than it'd otherwise be.
  • Winget installations of Firefox would end up noticeably cleaner(?) by default. Fewer registry strings and such.

Reasons I can see in favour of not adding

  • Adding such parameters wouldn't be a full substitute for my attempts to add/keep a Mozilla.MaintenanceService package, which I'm attempting despite various Winget end-users (At least 6 on record I know of) wanting it flagged due to not liking the package, an unprecedented situation from what I can tell.
  • Maintenance Service isn't entirely pointless (Especially for users without admin rights), and it does serve a seemingly beneficial effect for Firefox/Thunderbird users who want one less UAC warning in their days.

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