Bug: Thunderbird Update System Problem in Terminal Server Sessions (log in to different versions of Thunderbird, same profile)
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Priority: --
Created: 2021-10-15 12:07:07+00:00
Resolved: 2022-12-04 20:17:20+00:00

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.81 Safari/537.36 Edg/94.0.992.47

Steps to reproduce:

This is not a bug for standalone single PCs. But it is a bug in a terminal server environment. This occurs since the update system changed after Thunderbird 68.
So I am not 100% clear if that is a "defect" or "enhancement" - for my scenario it is definitely a defect though.

Environment - Windows terminal server (Microsoft RDS / Remote Desktop Services) with multiple session host servers.

Thunderbird automatically updates on one of the servers, but not necessarily at the same time. A user logs in and gets a session on the server with the updated Thunderbird. He logs off and later logs on again, this time he gets a user session on another session host server, which still has the old (not updated) Thunderbird version.


Actual results:

The user gets now a message about the mismatch of his (new) profile for the old Thunderbird version, and must create a new profile to be able to enter Thunderbird at all. This means he has lost all is email accounts and settings.


Expected results:

Well, the above is supposed to happen - and it works well for standalone computers, for single users and even multiple users.
But in a terminal server environment, the different session host servers can run different versions of Thunderbird - so it creates a problem when the same user logs into one or the other.

How does the problem come about? 
There is a setting in Preferences to control updates. 
There are only two options, both of them result in that above  problem.

1.  Setting = "Automatically install updates"
Here the "automatic" seems to mean upon first time somebody starts Thunderbird after an update is available. But this can be different on different servers - and not everybody uses Thunderbird, so above might occur.

2. Setting = "Check for updates but let me choose whether to install them" - we have set Thunderbird to use this option, so it SHOULD not install but I believe it prompts users? (Don't have confirmation, too many users).
So when it prompts them, some user might click UPDATE. So it gets updated on that server. Others may not, so on other servers.

So what could be done to solve this?

- one could have a third option: "Download and update manually"
  There should be then a button for "Download And Update", and only when a user 
  goes into that preference option and clicks that button, the update will occur. For 
  the terminal server situation, an administrator would then have to do this 
  monthly, and I think that's totally acceptable and far better than constant 
  monthly user complaints.
- or, when using the 2nd option "Check for updates but let me choose whether to install them", one should NOT prompt users to update. They must go into Preferences menu to do it. 
That can be of course a disadvantage for single PCs, the users will forget to update, so if that is a concern the 3rd option is best in my opinion.