Sunday, November 29, 2009

Firefox Updates and Magic Formation

For awhile now I have used a little gesture-based launcher called Magic Formation. Like many of the things that are designed to make my life simpler but end up consuming all my time, I found out about this tool on Lifehacker.

The tool is pretty simple. You draw a quick little circle with your mouse and up pops this circle of launch icons. It is also pretty addictive. When using a computer that doesn’t have Magic Formation installed, I find myself reflexively drawing useless little circles before realizing “Oh yeah, I’ve got to find the launch bar.”

One thing that keeps biting me, though, is that when Magic Formation is running, Firefox updates won’t work. When Firefox tries to apply an update you get “The update could not be installed. Please make sure there are no other copies of Firefox running on your computer, and then restart Firefox to try again.” Obviously Magic Formation is holding a handle to some kind of resource that Firefox update wants to change (firefox.exe?) and Firefox doesn’t like this.

The solution is simple. Just “Quit” out of Magic Formation, start or restart Firefox, let it update, then restart Magic Formation.

My only hope is that I will either remember I wrote this or goog will pick it up and I’ll find it the next time I have problems updating Firefox.

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