Mc can no longer competently extract from mozilla.org's .bz2 files.
https://midnight-commander.org/ticket/1952

e.g. using http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/r...9.0esr.tar.bz2 Mc changes all the dates to epoch.

If I use tar -xjf instead, ordinary files get extracted correctly, but directories get current timestamps. Bunzip2 -k does the same thing, as does 'bzip2 -cd firefox-68.9.0esr.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -'

The reason this comes up is I have multiple Firefox versions at all times. The content of these bz2 archives is in a firefox subdirectory. I want the content of each'es firefox/ extracted to a directory name of my choosing, e.g. ./ffe68/, without nesting it in a firefox/ directory, which used to be very simple with mc by simply "entering" the archive.

Has mozilla.org broken its .bz2 files? What's the right cmdline tool for competently extracting contents from .bz2 files (without affecting the .bz2 file itself)?

tar is responsible for restoring permissions and other attributes.
You can check the original content with tar tvf. Probably it depends on the type of the filesystem. Probably the directories [themselves] are not handled by tar at all. tar xf never modifies the original input file.

pan64, you are right about the directories, something I never dreamed was possible of any so-called "archive". The issue was isolated to the Firefox publication process as a consequence of my reporting this on Mozilla's bug tracker.