Software getting blocked due to mozilla installer

amundra15

I am trying to use Zotero on my work laptop, and while it worked initially, it is getting blocked by internal firewall now. Upon digging, I learnt that it is trying to run the mozilla installer (/Applications/Zotero.app/Contents/MacOS/updater.app/Contents/MacOS/org.mozilla.updater), and unfortunately my organisation blocks this as they only support Chrome browser. Is there a work around?

adamsmith

Zotero is based on Mozilla, so I don't think there's much of a chance of a workaround there, but your institution should be able to have more finegrained permissions.

dstillman

Note that it's the Mozilla updater, not the Mozilla installer.

You should talk to them if possible. Zotero is based on Firefox and uses the Mozilla updater (re-signed with our own code-signing certificate) to update itself. The fact that they only support Chrome shouldn't really be relevant here — it's not like you're using Firefox as a browser.

It's also not clear what the mechanism is by which they'd be blocking the updater, unless they're just blocking any executable with "mozilla" in the name. I'm not sure what the point would be of blocking the updater specifically separately from the Firefox app itself…

If you really couldn't get them to add an exception, it would be possible to delete the update files, disable auto-updates, and update manually going forward, but that's obviously not a good solution (and would be an ironic result from a security standpoint).

amundra15

Thanks for your responses @adamsmith @dstillman

An exception unfortunately is tricky, so I want to try deleting the update files.

After installing the software, if I try to launch it immediately, it result in a security block pop-up. Once I delete the updater file manually, there is no pop up, but the software doesn't launch either. Do you have suggestions on how to make this work?

dstillman

No, you should never touch application files — that's not what I was referring to. Update files are stored in ~/Library/Caches/Zotero/updates.

Re-download Zotero from the download page, which will also clear the cached update files.

If you really want to disable automatic updates after that, you can go to the Config Editor from the bottom of the Advanced pane of the settings and set app.update.auto to false. You'll then want to regularly check the changelog for new versions and install them manually.

amundra15

Thank you @dstillman for the clarification and the very clear instructions. That did the trick!