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/
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
Hell of a lot more useful than the 3d objects directory that they added in 10
I wonder how many people work with 3d images as opposed to gaming. The only 3d objects I have exist within reality.
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.
The fun part is, at least since Win95, games were supposed to store their data in the My documents directory. The only game I remember actually going with this was Max Payne, everyone else was just dumping everything in the directory with the exe.
Then Vista came out and those who cared, were scrambling to update their games. The rest just went - shrug eh, run in compatibility mode.
I thought this was the best thing they did. Each user would have their documents (let call it your stuff) separate from another user.
If you share a PC with someone then you would know how this was a good thing.
Even if you don’t share your PC with anyone, you don’t want your nephew to miss up your saves when he comes in the summer and his mom wants you to allow him to play.
Windows’s dedicated Saved Gamed folder is within the same user-specific directories that Documents and AppData are in, and would still allow for game saves to be user-specific.
I think maybe you misunderstand me.
In Windows 10 and 11, inside each user folder was a folder specifically meant for game saves.
The only devs I’ve seen use it are CD Project Red.
Ooh I see. I thought you’re against it. I know how the appdata folder works.
I saw OP complaining that firefox is using .mozilla and I thought he wanted data to be saved at program files/firefox.
Then when I read your comment I thought that you’re complaining why devs are using user folder or appdata instead of program files/.
Well, the user is complaining about where it’s installed on Linux, not Windows.
It’s in the home directory. On Linux, most applications split data between a cache, config and local directories. But for Firefox everything is in one.
Personally, I don’t mind it. It makes transferring my Firefox setup between distros easy.
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/mozillawould have been decent enough as a temporary solutionThey 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.
I think moving the folder under
~/.localbefore 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.There exists
~/.cache/mozilla(also~/.cache/thunderbird), so I assume the cache is already separated?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)
Nah. They’d “bike shed” even that idea.
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//.Don’t you need to manually configure remapping those folders, or is it automatically done when revoking the prrmission?
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