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:
- When doing interactive installs of Firefox, users are asked whether to also install Mozilla Maintenance Service or not.
- When doing silent installs of
Mozilla.Firefox(...), they are not asked, and it automatically installs Mozilla Maintenance Service.
- Users who silent installs then have not just 1, but 2 new packages listed in Windows Settings (and in e.g. Geekuninstaller).
- 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.
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:
Mozilla.Firefox(...), they are not asked, and it automatically installs Mozilla Maintenance Service.Reasons I can see in favour to add
Reasons I can see in favour of not adding
Mozilla.MaintenanceServicepackage, 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.