870573 - (Better) compliance with "Designed for Windows" guidelines, less clutter in %ProgramFiles%

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Stefan Kanthak]

User Agent: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.0; U; de) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.02

Steps to reproduce:

Install Firefox and/or Thunderbird and/or SeaMonkey and/or other Mozilla products.


Actual results:

Every installation creates one or more directories "Mozilla <product>" directly in %ProgramFiles%, and Gecko is installed in each of them.


Expected results:

Use a base directory "Mozilla" in %ProgramFiles% and place the different Mozilla products in subdirectories "Mozilla\<product>".
This complies with the recommendation %ProgramFiles%\<vendor>\<product> of Microsofts "Designed for Windows" guidelines and reduces the number of directories in %ProgramFiles%.

And, if possible: install the common components (like Gecko) either in their own subdirectories below %ProgramFiles%\Mozilla\ or into their own directory in %CommonProgramFiles%\Mozilla\ (that's another requirement/recommendation of the "Designed for Windows" guidelines).

JFTR: please dont try to counter that with "but Microsoft (or another vendor) uses countless directories 'Microsoft <product> in %ProgramFiles%" too: even MSFT should follow its own guidelines!

Comment 1

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

This was discussed several years ago and it was decided not to implement these recommendations (note: I have personally discussed this with Microsoft and they are just recommendations and are not requirements) for several reasons... a couple of these are:
Each app's gecko files can be different than another app's gecko files.
Each app can choose to provide an update so sharing these files would either prevent another app from providing an update or break another app.

This is wontfix

Comment 2

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

JFTR: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html