In 2018 in a real OS (linux) it shows up along with all the other updates in a central gui for updating your OS that depending on your flavor may notify you of available updates for example by incriminating the number in a tray icon but never forces you to install except when it is convenient for you.

If you install locally. Example downloading the nightly build to a local dir or installing in windows you may receive notifications of a new version when you open it but you can safely dismiss them with one click and update next Thursday if you like. At no point will it decide that its time whether you like it or not like windows update.

> My favorite is prompting me to restart to install an update when I open it.

It's the best they can do. Windows carries a lot of baggage and bad decisions around its OS design. One of them is that when a file has an exclusive lock (eg an .exe file that's running) it can't be deleted. NTFS and Windows Kernel don't implement reference counting like a proper OS.

So Firefox (or any software package with in-place self-update functionality) needs to wait until the application is shut down to perform updates. Firefox team chose to do it before launching the app. They could have done it after closing it. Both approaches have their pros and cons so it's not easy to criticize them either way.

The only problem with IE box model was that they implemented it before the standard got finished (and changed) so it was impossible to fix it without breaking already existing web pages.

The situation is not very different from now with Chrome implementing unfinished proposals.

> Changing the box model

Most of the things you said I agree. But honestly the box model is one of these. The additive model standardized by W3C isn't really popular in the web designer crowd. I cut my teeth in an era where W3C and standard compliance were huge things, so I accepted the additive model without question. Nowadays though many designers opt for Microsoft's "broken" box model aka subtractive model through the box-sizing property.

Few things to note:

- Edge is (kindof) available on Android. It uses the Chromium engine, but includes bookmark and password syncing with the desktop version.

- Firefox will (depending on platform support) update in the background and notify you to restart (Windows), or it will apply the update at app start (macOS).

On Arch Linux, the browser would often crash after the system upgrade installed a newer version of Firefox. I read on their bug tracker that the upgrade prompt was a workaround for this (or at least one reason for it).

> It's 2018. The era is office like updates is over.

It's 2018. If you don't want to deal with updates like that, then stop using a shitty OS like windows.