Is this behavior expected? I would imagine it would be a privacy violation in a multi-user system. I thought they had some sort of encryption for hiding the sites that I visit.
BTW, FF does not do this on private mode. But still it is concerning, that any program can know about the sites I visit just by looking at ~/.mozilla/profile/storage/default.
The tilde (~) means that path is located in the per-user home directory. The default behaviour is for user home directories to be only accessible by that specific user.
The encryption you’re referring to is likely specific to Firefox Sync (i.e. syncing your FF settings, history, etc. across devices). Sync is end-to-end encrypted. But I’m not surprised that it’s unencrypted on disk.
But wouldn’t it be better if they chose to obfuscate it. Are there any inherent disadvantage in doing so?
I mean, lots of problems rise from this from interoperability, debug ability, removing control & ownership of your own data…etc
Obfuscating the data means you no longer have access to it, you cannot integrate with it, …etc This is a problem for a project that promotes itself for openness and compatibility.
Firefox should not be solving your user level access permission problems, that’s not it’s job 🤦