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submitted 11 months ago by sysadmin@lemmy.world to c/firefox@lemmy.ml

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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[-] Zozano@aussie.zone 69 points 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

[-] PaigePalisade@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 11 months ago

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

[-] Zozano@aussie.zone 9 points 11 months ago

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

[-] PaigePalisade@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 11 months 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.

[-] QuazarOmega@lemmy.world 26 points 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

[-] refurbishedrefurbisher 10 points 11 months 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.

[-] sudotstar@kbin.social 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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 4 points 11 months ago

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

[-] QuazarOmega@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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)

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

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

[-] linuxisfun@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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/<appid>/.

[-] IverCoder@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

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

this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
130 points (99.2% liked)

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