If you try to check for updates without an internet connection, The application updater states "APPLICATION is up to date". we should change to say "APPLICATION can't connect to the internet right now. Make sure you are connected and try again". This helps users with sporadic internet connections (Dial-up, satellite, tether, etc)

The about dialog intentionally does not display errors per Firefox UX. For the case when there are multiple background check failures we display UI informing the user after X number of failures. This prevents us from annoying users nearly as much in the case when they are periodically on a network that prevents them from connecting and still notify them after they have repeated background failures which typically would be after multiple days. If this is in regards to the about dialog, then this is a Firefox -> General bug since that code intentionally doesn't display errors per Firefox UX. I do plan on creating a new app update widget that can be used by the about dialog that will have the option of displaying errors. After that is created and Firefox's about dialog uses it then it would also be a Firefox bug if they choose not to turn on displaying errors. Moving to Firefox -> General. If this is about the background check then please move back to Toolkit -> app update.

As I mentioned in bug 1017817, the problem is the notification is only displayed in case of background update check failures (by default, ten of them, controlled by the app.update.backgroundMaxErrors preference). There's no notification in the case of a check from the About Firefox window, whether that check is automatic or the result of clicking the Check for Updates button. So users would never know Firefox is outdated when automatic updates are disabled and the update server is unreachable due to malware problems or other reasons.