Linus already has a backup. Its Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Yes. ~/.mozilla. Its annoying.
You can fix it with a hack by putting a shell script in your path (before the original firefox) that consist of:
#!/bin/sh
HOME='/home/engywuck/.local/share/firefox' /usr/bin/firefox
Call that instead of the original firefox from now on. it will create the “librewolf” folder in ~/.local/share and chuck its junk in there.
Edit: This bug has been open for TWENTY YEARS.
Honestly ridiculous.
Blanket statements of a group are harmful.
Blanket, emotional statements are harmful.
The data collected sounds like a nothing-burger. Of course they collect the data you upload, and of course they store data (like messages) that need to continue to be networked to clients.
How they use the data does sound like corporate trash though.
They have also had this issue open for 20 years.
And this amounts to just allowing the user to specify a different directory for Firefox on Linux (~/.mozilla is terrible).
Frankly unacceptable.