this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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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/ 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/

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hell of a lot more useful than the 3d objects directory that they added in 10

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder how many people work with 3d images as opposed to gaming. The only 3d objects I have exist within reality.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

From what I understand, when the directory was added VR, MR, and 3d printing were just becoming more main stream. It is easy to see why some at Microsoft believed that an easy to use modeling applications like Microsoft 3d Builder would be as essential as Microsoft Paint. With hindsight, we can see that 3d printing is still too complicated and not useful enough for the average computer user and most VR users are either content to use models from others or to use more complicated tools like Blender.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

They could do what Steam does in the short term, which is to move the folder to ~/.local/share/mozilla/* and symlink to ~/.mozilla/*

The reason for doing that instead of symlinking the whole folder is so the configuration could later be moved to ~/.config/mozilla down the line.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I know, it's not a complete solution, but it would at least serve as a stop gap to clean the mess out of the home folder, before the actually compliant implementation is made, XDG_DATA_HOME should always be saved as it contains the user generated data of an app (that isn't documents)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Nah. They'd "bike shed" even that idea.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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/<appid>/.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Don't you need to manually configure remapping those folders, or is it automatically done when revoking the prrmission?

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