You may have been lucky or have some specific config or workflow that made you avoid this issue.
I'm using a regular Arch installation with Firefox and Pacman. The "please restart" page appears regularly; I just had it yesterday. This occurs when running `pacman -Syu` in some background terminal while Firefox is active.
Not really, it's a relatively recent change in Firefox; I'd say for about a year, or maybe a bit longer? (time has been fuzzy these last few years). Before that I would always run updates in my distro in the background and wasn't forced to break my workflow in whatever application I was using.
Used to be able to also run Fedora distro upgrades while the system is running, now we're back in Windows-like territory, where I have to restart the system and wait for it to re-install 2-3k packages pretty slowly.
I don’t think this is a Firefox specific thing. When you do a Pacman upgrade you’re changing the files on disk. Any time those files need to be loaded in the future ought to trigger a warning from any program that doesn’t want to mysteriously break on you because it’s not loading what the previous version you still have in memory expected.
The only real workaround for this is systems like NixOS where the previous version is left intact when you do updates.
Yes, it's 100% normal; and it doesn't really bother me personally. The "please restart" page only appears when opening a new tab (so the disruption is minimal). I never lost any work because of this so it's just a minor inconvenience.
I was sharing my experience to illustrate that Arch does not have any protection against this problem _by default_. The post I was replying to was comparing Arch's package to a manual installation.
> The "please restart" page only appears when opening a new tab (so the disruption is minimal).
I usually open a new tab when I want to do something in that new tab, which makes the disruption very annoying. (As far as I remember, it also blocks loading of new pages in existing tabs thereafter so the disruption is total.) Then during the restart it loses all info in private tabs.
I'm using a regular Arch installation with Firefox and Pacman. The "please restart" page appears regularly; I just had it yesterday. This occurs when running `pacman -Syu` in some background terminal while Firefox is active.