Even after all these years firefox keeps using mozilla hidden directory instead of XDG base directories. For how long will this continue?

Watch https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259356 for updates to this request.

~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile> is a mish-mash of data, config, and cache. It’s not simple to unravel that. Beyond that, it would be a breaking change, and that requires more caution.

credit: u/yo_99 on Reddit.

original link: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/vkgk78/why_does_firefox_keeps_using_mozilla_directory/

  • Zozano@aussie.zone
    3·
    11 months ago

    Reminds me of when Windows made a designated folder for game saves.

    And then every dev decided to keep placing saves in the Documents folder or AppData folder

  • linuxisfun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    This is one of the reasons I use Flatpak whenever I can. I’ve revoked all Flatpak apps the permission to access the root of my home directory via a global override, so anything they wanted to do in there (e. g. create folders, place malicious code in my ~/.bashrc, etc.), actually happens in ~/.var/app//.

  • QuazarOmega@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    Many rather treat standards as suggestions 😒.
    Jokes aside, I have wondered what prevents them from doing it too, I guess they probably don’t think it’s important enough to really work out how to split up the files.
    Then again, moving the whole folder to ~/.local/share/mozilla would have been decent enough as a temporary solution

    • sudotstar@kbin.social
      0·
      11 months ago

      I think moving the folder under ~/.local before splitting the cache folders out is a bad idea. Many people will have specific backup or sync solutions in place that want to include config, recreate data, and exclude cache, so the XDG spec has separate locations for them.

      • xvlc@feddit.de
        1·
        11 months ago

        There exists ~/.cache/mozilla (also ~/.cache/thunderbird), so I assume the cache is already separated?