Best practice for Self Service Upgrades?

[Backoffice]

Whenever a new version of a browser comes out, I create and upload the pkg, and then upload it to the JSS and set it to Make available through Self service.

What is the best practice for killing and (removing if necessary) the existing sessions and editions of say Chrome and Firefox?

I've noticed after installing them, and then launching the browsers, they both seem to request a restart to update - which isn't ideal

Do you put in a pre-installs script to remove the older version? If so, does this work without removing all of their bookmarks and extensions?

[AVmcclint · Accepted solution]

Here's what I use to upgrade Firefox in self service. pkill makes sure the app is quit first. I also have it look for any copies of firefox that the user may have installed into their home folder- they like to do that.

#!/bin/sh

#variable for storing the current users name
currentuser=`stat -f "%Su" /dev/console`

# kills the firefox process before updating
pkill firefox

# delete /Applications/Firefox.app and ~/Applications/Firefox.app
rm -Rf "/Applications/Firefox.app/"

if [ -e "/Users/$currentuser/Applications/Firefox.app/" ]
then
    rm -Rf "/Users/$currentuser/Applications/Firefox.app/"
else exit 0 
fi

[AVmcclint]

I do have to get more creative with Chrome because it's autoupdate is tougher to kill. There are threads about that somewhere here in JamfNation.

[john_sherrod]

Are you scheduling your updates for a certain time of day? Just curious how you handle that since killing Firefox while the user is using it could be disruptive.

[AVmcclint]

I put it in self service so users do it at their convenience, but I also make it a Login item so there's no chance of it interrupting them and it automatically installs.

[john_sherrod]

That’s a really good idea. I need to implement that.