Firefox does a fair number of things in the background to help keep things up to date. This includes checking for updates to Firefox itself, checking for updates to add-ons you have installed and checking for updates to a blocklist that disables known unstable add-ons. Normally it does these things quite happily, but for developers and QA, trying to verify that these background tasks are doing what they are supposed to can be annoying. After all who wants to leave Firefox running for a day just to see if it finds a new update?

I’ve written a small extension that helps test these background tasks. It is fairly simple, just gives you a menu option to trigger one of the background checks. It saves delving through preferences and changing the timers to run faster. Most users shouldn’t use it but I figure it is useful for other developers and add-on authors so I’ve put it in the sandbox on AMO and you can go download it from there.