As part of the upcoming release of Firefox 147, Mozilla has resolved an error message regarding the lack of support for the Freedesktop XDG Base Directory standard. The report has been open for a full 21 years, and the fix will make Firefox installation files cleaner and more organized.
Bug 259356, created in September 2004, revealed that Firefox was not tracking Characteristics of the XDG base catalogwhich instructs application developers to place configuration, data, and cache files in subdirectories already created in the user's home directory. You may already know these directories, for example ~/.config And ~/.cacheand they are integrated in Linux as environment variables. Instead, Firefox will create its own when installed ~/.mozilla The directory is organized in Mozilla's own way.
You can see it for yourself if you run That ls team in your home directory, showing hidden files with the -a flag:
ls -aYou can see the Mozilla directory listed next to the XDG standard. ~/.config the directory is already in use by other applications that conform to the XDG base directory specifications.
The lack of standardization means that finding and editing Firefox files is a task in itself. In contrast, learning the files of many other applications that use the XDG standard takes only one lesson on directory structure, and you can find them using variables like $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. It also keeps your home directory free of clutter because you have fewer hidden application folders while software resources are still in standard directories when you need them.
This bug fix will appear in Firefox 147, which I expect to be released in January 2026. As someone who uses Firefox on Linux computers daily, I'll be looking for it. I'm glad to see Mozilla making their software more efficient from an organizational standpoint for us Tux fans.
However, I can't help but notice that Mozilla is throwing us this bone at the same time. Firefox is becoming an annoying and invasive AI tool. The Firefox web browser is popular with people who use Linux because they tend to be privacy-conscious, and Firefox has a less problematic history of data collection and bloat than Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. I certainly appreciate the home directory being a little less cluttered, but I think Mozilla has bigger problems with Firefox that it needs to solve if it wants to stay in the good graces of Linux users.
