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Why does firefox keeps using ~/.mozilla directory? (self.firefox)

submitted 1 year ago by sysadmin to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] QuazarOmega 21 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] 5 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.

[–] QuazarOmega 1 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

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

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

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