This! I set up everyone in my family with Firefox because of sync that just works.
I prefer reading content, especially PDFs, on my computer over my phone. One useful feature Firefox has is the ability to just send a tab to a device. When I am out and about, I would queue up reading papers by sending them from my phone to my computer. When I get home, my browser would have the tabs right there, ready for me to read.
I'm not convinced. Recently moved to a new computer and firefox didn't sync my settings in about:config and didn't sync my container assignments (had to go in and enable it manually in both the source and target computers, buried deep in the settings for the containers extension). It doesn't sync addons or addon settings. I don't think it synced all the interface customization (like removing pocket icon from the url bar, separate urlbar/search box), only some of it. I got my bookmarks, so that was helpful. To sync a lot of other stuff I was able to copy my prefs.js from the old to the new, and most of those settings worked.
It can be a pain when you do large random deletes from browsing history, then sync can hang up for 20 minutes with lot of IO/Cpu. You can trigger this by doing "Forget this website" and if that website is a lot in your history
I suppose it probably has to rewrite your entire history in that case? Deleting lines in log-like files isn't exactly easy. Actually, I wonder how that's stored in order for the search to stay responsive, some kind of bloom filter? Or just a normal database?
I use it every single day for spawning AWS SSO urls into their dedicated containers, since each url is always of the form console.aws.amazon.com which makes writing rules for it stupid hard
Same. I've tried to switch from a chromium based browser to FF several times over the last several years, and I always found something that was a deal breaker. A few months ago when the Google war on adblockers really started gaining steam, I tried the switch again, and it's been flawless, and I haven't found any good reasons not to use FF. It's been my default browser for at least two months now, and if it weren't for wanting web-usb for a few devices, I wouldn't even have a chromium based browser installed.
Yes, it just works; but a few days back all my devices suddenly lost almost all of the passwords. Not all but most of them, couldn't make out any pattern or reason. Luckily a Linux laptop that I don't usually use had the full set and I had to export them, sync, and import them back to restore everywhere. Very scary, any ideas why this could've happened? I immediately backed up for the future, but this kind of loss should not be happening.
No idea. I've been using Firefox and Sync for years, currently on 5 devices (one android). Never had a problem. Firefox 121.0 (64-bit). This is the "release" channel. Maybe you're beta testing?
You know what, you could be onto something. I'm using the Firefox Developer version (122.0b3 64 bit). In any case, how are the differences resolved? E.g., in my recent case, all the devices ended up with only a handful of passwords (17), whereas the Linux laptop had 858. When I brought that laptop online (after exporting them), it synced and also ended up with the 17. I wonder what the logic was to deduce that the 17 are the ones to keep and the 858 should be deleted (there are some common ones of course). Because after sync when I imported the 858 back, it kept them all and synced them to all other devices, so it considered them as additions that should be kept.
I used Firefox's password manager for a long time but eventually switched to KeePass which is FOSS and not cloud based. It's much better than the browser builtin password managers.
I store the .kdbx file in Syncthing (== Dropbox) so it automagically syncs between all my computers and phones. Use the KeepassXC app on computers along with their browser plugins, and the KeepassDX app on Android (idk about iOS).
One advantage of this is that the passwords work across all browsers. If you use FF's password manager, you only get passwords available in Firefox; but with Keepass they work in FF & Chrome & for native android apps & etc. And with the browser plugins it works about as well as the browser's native password managers. It also has support for TOTP 2 factor authentication.
Also I can easily make a copy of the .kdbx file (literally just ctrl-c ctrl-v the file) to save archives of my password db. (That said, over years of having the database open across multiple devices and editing it while open on multiple devices, it's never gotten corrupted)
Similar workflow here. On iOS I use Keepassium, which can access files on Dropbox, so it can read and write to the master password file there, which then propagates to the other machines with Dropbox installed.
Whatever password manager you use I would consider browser integration critical. This is because it will check the domain for you and prevent phishing attacks that may work if you need to copy+paste your password. The fact that the password doesn't auto-fill is a huge red flag that interrupts your regular workflow and requires an unusual manual action to be phished.
But whether that is an in-browser password manager or a third-party manager with browser-integration (usually via an extension) probably doesn't matter much.
Weird, I'm using Firefox across 6 different devices, different OSes (Android, MacOS, various Linux distros) and different versions (current or LTS) and it just works.
The notepad application or a pad of sticky notes with which to decorate your monitor with the halo of arcane sigils known to ward off security breaches?
Both. I like to keep a file in notepad updated with all my corporate passwords, which I then print and post on the wall by my monitor.
I also use a label maker to fix the login credentials for shared computers on the backside of their keyboards.
I suspect people like me are the reason my firm is trying so hard to migrate to single sign in instead of dozens of unique passwords which require updates
> I also use a label maker to fix the login credentials for shared computers on the backside of their keyboards.
That's not terrible, depends on the level of physical security you have
> which I then print and post on the wall by my monitor.
That's pretty bad any any passing person or camera can see them
> Both. I like to keep a file in notepad updated with all my corporate passwords
That's the worst of your 3 methods though, but for many attacks is more secure in practice than using chrome/google sharing, especially if the file isn't called "password.txt" or similar.
I absolutely loathe needing to know more than one password per sector of my life - ideally I'd prefer a password manager as they're more flexible.. but SSO is alright too.
Why would anyone need a reason? I mean it seriously. Chrome users on this platform really baffling for me. They know what the consequences are, they know quite well what the icon with their picture on the corner does. Still being OK with this is super interesting.
Most products are often get grilled here for having closed code parts or similar concerns but when it comes to giving complete audit of their online existence, "meh...". Same folks who criticize canonical (which I disagree strongly with their late practices) only to install chrome as their browser on their systems.
Firefox stutters. Every couple of seconds, if I'm doing anything active on the page, it freezes up for a fraction of a second. I have no idea if that's a garbage collection issue or what, but it makes it painful to use.
That being said, I'm on Safari instead. Chrome doesn't make me happy.
I think the big difference is stated purpose vs execution, especially combined with who/when that elicits a response vs passive agreement/disagreement. An extremely small proportion of even the super techno-nerd crowd are really about the principles of open source, all other considerations be damned, when selecting software to use. That said, when something claiming supposed to be the bastion for that use case and antithesis of what the closed for profits do does something they'd expect from the latter it elicits an extremely strong response from nearly all of those that are as well as a good portion of those who have other considerations just because of the hypocrisy. Windows/macOS adding a new Bing or Siri integration somewhere, while getting some mumblings, isn't going to illicit nearly the same kind of reaction from the crowd though as everyone already knows and expects that of them. The majority of even highly technical users tend to use software based on what they find most productive, not necessarily the software with the best policies and licensing. So, statistically speaking, you tend to get complaints about open source software not being up to snuff or principle followed by most people choosing non-open software much of the time anyways because they feel it works better for them.
For Firefox specifically, it's long failed at holding the web back from Chrome and the choice isn't about that anymore. That title has firmly been with Safari for a long time now. Because Safari isn't available on all platforms it leaves not much of a concern to choose a Chromium based browser outside that group who operate solely on principle not 100% of the browser is open source.
I think for a long time Firefox languished a bit too far behind Chromium in many architectural aspects (I remember waiting fooooreeever for Electrolysis then when it came out the browser was significantly slower than Chrom* at the time). This comparison is leaps and bounds better today but it's a bit of a day late, dollar short situation in that it's not better enough to get droves of people to switch over again like the IE vs Firefox era.
The other thing I'll mention is when the topic of browsers comes up people's goto is the last issue they personally had with each. Given the size and complexity of browsers combined with the amount of hardware, OS, and use case variance this tends to feel more akin to people arguing whether lottery numbers skew odd vs even based on their last experience than anything about the actual browsers. Even when the discussion steers towards talk of a specific feature a lot of the time that feature didn't even originate in the browser it's being brought up for.
I've avoided FF sync because I don't want my browser history on the cloud. I only really want my profile configuration, such as my addons and userjs flags. Unfortunately the FF directory in my .config is intermixed enough between config and content that I don't try to back it up. Am I missing something?
FF Sync doesnt work by backing up your config directory to some cloud storage. That would be a recipe for disaster since your profile has certain machine specific settings configured automatically by the browser. When you enable Sync you get to explicitly decide which things you want to include in the sync. I have mine set to just addons, configs, and bookmarks.
EDIT: After writing this, I realized I should investigate the claim, because new devices are added just by logging in, not by giving them any sort of password.
I don't know what criteria is required to meet an E2EE (End to end encryption?) standard.
In general though, the info is stored on Mozilla's (or an affiliate's) cloud.[0]
1. If you lose your password and didn't setup a separate password recovery code (one time codes), then your data is toast. You can't reset your password via email without wiping your cloud data because mozilla uses your password in a hashing algorithm to store your data.
2. If I recall, you have to setup a 2FA to login on new devices.
> I don't know what criteria is required to meet an E2EE (End to end encryption?) standard.
Only sender and receiver (the “ends”) can decrypt the data, ie have the keys. In this case both ends are “you”, and the passphrase is the authentication for new devices. For e2ee to hold, neither the passphrase nor the key can be shared with another party, for instance Mozilla.
> 1. If you lose your password and didn't setup a separate password recovery code (one time codes), then you're toast.
That sounds right, and is similar to password managers. Your data is encrypted as a vault with a key derived from the passphrase. The vault is opaque to anyone without the key. Though you still have to trust the software.
OK. It sounds like E2EE encryption in effect because Mozilla encrypts your cloud data with a password hashing algorithm.
[I edited my comment above to get into more nuance about password reset is possible, but wipes data.]
If you lose your Mozilla account password, you can reset it, but
> Any data you have on the server will be erased when you reset your password (unless you use recovery keys). Your other devices will stop synchronizing unless you update them with the new password.[0]
Erasing cloud data is not a biggie, because as soon as you log back in (with the new password) from a device with the old data, it will get reuploaded. FF does the safe thing when synchronising.
> If you can add devices without entering encryption info, how can it be properly E2E?
It can’t. I don’t know about FF, but if you can add a device without explicit approval of one of your existing provisioned devices it is what I call Fake E2EE.
You see different providers go to great lengths to do device local encryption etc but due to product requirements (“what if a user loses their device or forgets their passphrase”) they keep a copy of the key, yet slaps the e2ee label on their product. So now it’s just regular encryption at rest with all the risks (subpoenas, rogue employees, company gets acquired, new CEO starts drooling over data broker dollars etc), only with much more technical complexity since data now needs to be read-writable client side by different software versions, increasing the risk of corruption, data loss and bugs.
Password managers with true e2ee actually suffer from these corruption issues from time to time. But that’s a price that must be paid for the e2ee level of security. It’s not for everyone – I wished there was more honesty around this instead of diluting meaningful and precise terms.
Edit: seems like FF has e2ee, see sibling comment.
If the encryption info is derived from the password it can be done without visual encryption keys for the user. It is the case with Firefox Sync. They have no way to recover the data if you forget the password.
The original Firefox sync did this "right" (from a privacy and encryption perspective) but required user out-of-band transfer of key material to add a new device. Apparently this was too difficult for users, so they dropped it in favour of "user accounts" with passwords instead.
There's no off-channel key synchronization. What means that the encryption is only as good as your password. But AFAIK no browser has it anyway, and nearly no sync service.
Actually, I have redone the steps on my computer after that comment, and well, I was wrong.
Firefox sync seems to work by key authorization, that is done by in-channel sharing and user confirmation for PCs and a QR code for phones. It's a quite good process, that looks similar to what you are describing.
I just don't know why I remembered something different.
They posted an article a while ago with a high level overview of how FF Sync encryption works, but the TL;DR is that the key for E2EE is derived from your account password.
I was looking at this recently and still couldn’t make it work smoothly. The server itself is fine but I couldn’t get Firefox to pick up the new sync server url from about:config.
Possibly my fault and I need to poke at it a little more but in general I can start a docker container just fine so I feel like its maybe not quite there yet.
It works pretty well actually! I love FF sync and I started self hosting it earlier this year. You can find the full details (also changes needed in the browser settings) here: https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2023/03/18/self-hosting-fire...
I only wish they would make their new rust based server available via docker(-compose) too. I have not found a working version of that yet
You can choose to sync or not sync bookmarks, history, open tabs, logins and passwords, credit cards, add-ons and settings individually. So, yeah, you're missing that you can just not sync history!
Firefox on iOS randomly changes the order of new bookmarks, adding new ones to either the top or the bottom of the list. I assume they're assuming ordering in some underlying platform data structure that doesn't support it?
At any rate I've found Firefox on iOS/iPadOS to be surprisingly buggy.. tabs hang and need to be closed, not all bookmarks are synced and/or the ordering changing per above, showing sponsored ads in the new tab shortcuts list and needing a force-close until they go away after being disabled, etc. etc.
Configuring browsers to mirror each other across machines makes a big soupy mess. I understand why surveillance capitalists like the idea, makes their lives a little easier. But I really don't get why I'm supposed to want it.
I use different machines differently. The laptop I'm typing this on is my "main" browser, I have lots of bookmarks set up in a specific structure. I only use my phone browser when I have to, and it is rarely the same thing I've done before. It has a couple stale bookmarks, I don't care. I use the browser on my iPad even less. My big desktop is where I play with recreational software development, it has lots of bookmarks, but a very different set than my laptop. And my work phone/work laptop are their own things.
It just seems like making every closet door in your house open the same closet, if that where physically possible. There are reasons different things go in different buckets.
Shoutout to the time I was looking at job listings on my cellphone, which then immediately popped up on my work computer in front of my coworkers. I didn't even know there _was_ a sync feature, it got turned on automatically after an update. Fun.
Don't use your personal account on your work browser. Or, actually, on anything in your work. (And the other way around too.)
Nobody implements proper context switching and privacy from yourself. The only kind of privacy anybody even acknowledges the existence is from 3rd parties.
Personal account? Account? When I switch from my desktop to my laptop and back, I sometimes get an extra Firefox icon in my dock. I once hovered over it and I think it was the sync feature.
I don't have a Firefox account and I'm not signed in into any browser on any account. Why does it try to sync things without my permission?
Nope, whatever they had me download. It's Macs so maybe they autoattached to handover or whatever Apple calls that feature. Which I like, but only for texts and phone calls.
The devices I mention are all in the same local network so maybe they discover each other.
Anyway, there's a post in this thread that explains perfectly why I (or that poster) don't need or want sync. Basically my different machines are used for different purposes so there's no reason to mix bookmarks or move browsing history around. As for credit card numbers... what is this insanity? I don't save credit card numbers anywhere.
It’s probably handoff. On chrome I get the extra icon as well, but it also has a phone mini-icon over it and a tooltip saying “from Safari”. You can disable handoff, just goo—er, duckduckgo it
Sounds like the "Handoff" functionality baked into MacOS. If it is, it is not the same cloud-based sync mechanism referred to in this thread and by the person you are replying to. You can disable Handoff system-wide in System Settings --> General --> AirDrop & Handoff.
Can some long-standing user of iOS Firefox say if the sync issues there have been fixed? Halfway-broken sync on iOS version of Firefox (as well as a general lack of love for it and the UI that kept getting redesigned every other month) was the reason why I switched to Safari 4 years ago.
I have used Firefox sync in my new Mac M3 and it flawlessly synced everything from my older mac, my Android phone, my Linux workhorse, and Windows machine. Really love firefox.
This is the exact reason I've started using Firefox for the past few years and never looked back. My passwords are synced across devices and I just let FF autogenerate them. I memorize a couple important ones like email and banking, rest is handled by Firefox. Best is that it also works for apps on my Android.
I have nothing but praise for Firefox's Sync. It has saved me countless times. Back when I had more than 4 active machines it would sometimes trip up here and there with a bookmark or another, but it was always really solid overall.
See "Chrome Sync privacy is still very bad"[1] and its predecessor article[2] about Chrome and Firefox for an evaluation of the privacy and security of browser syncing.
For me the deal breaker is that it doesn’t use native UI elements on macOS which means patterns such as invoking menu items using the keyboard behave differently.
Does Chrome? Can't say I notice too much of a difference here on my macbook, other than slight color choices and paddings and whatever the 2 UIs are basically indistinguishable to me
I used it from when it was Phoenix until 2011 or so.
I left because it was a lot worse than my main two other options on MacOS at the time, and they’d not followed through on the things that made me like it when I adopted it, so I hadn’t really loved it since late 1.x or early 2.x.
I haven’t gone back because there’s no compelling reason to switch back from Safari.
It is still my mod-downloading browser on my Windows gaming PC.
In all HN Firefox threads with a sufficient number of comments you’ll see a variation of this comment, and people answering how Firefox fails as a daily driver for them.
Firefox is missing a ton of very useful stuff for some people, such as some audio API or AppleScript¹. The latter absolutely kills it for any kind of automation on macOS. It’s the sole major browser on macOS without support for AppleScript but Mozilla people think that’s just a power user feature. I know because I talked with devs at various points, in person and online, and was given the same answer. Thing is, power users create automations for non-power users. When the latter want to use a tool from the former and the answer is “you can’t, Firefox doesn’t support it”, there’s another user lost.
On a personal anecdotal level, I also don’t find it that stable. Just recently I wanted to try an extension and decided to do so on Firefox. After a while it just removed the extension from the list and it was seemingly impossible to get back, even after reinstalling. Every time I give Firefox a try, I am disappointed.
I’m glad it works for you and many other people, but the answer as to why it isn’t more popular is that your experience is far from universal.
They lost a lot of their userbase back in the day when they started getting slower and Chrome was way faster. Now, Chrome is default on Android devices and people are used to it on desktop. Edge is default on Windows, Safari on Mac and iDevices. The only place Firefox is the default is desktop Linux.
Nowadays they've caught up on speed pretty well on desktop, but are still behind on security, and years behind on security on Android.
Personally, I just like features like tab groups, and hate the Foundation's politics, so it was easy to drop it back when they said we need more than deplatforming. The competition has better features, is actually developing new features, and is focused on toolmaking instead of activism. Funnily enough, it shows up in the products.
It does work very well, but personally I'd appreciate a mechanism that I could implement manually and without the cloud. Something like "copy files Foo, Bar and Baz on the source device to folder DooDad on the target device". I appreciate that this doesn't work for mobile devices with their filesystem-free presentation, but even there I'd rather explicitly import data from a file I downloaded than have it move through the cloud.
You should check out SyncThing. It's a privacy-respecting p2p file sharing application that you can use like Dropbox. A little fiddly to set up but works like a charm once you get it going
Firefox's sync service is open source [1], so you can self-host it and update your about:config to point to it. I do this and it works great. (I believe you can even self-host the accounts service if you really want to)
Caveat is that I've linked to the old Python one, and they've got a new Rust one, but it didn't support SQLite the last time I had checked.
You can copy around profiles, which are just directories, or if you only want bookmarks you can export/import them to HTML or JSON easily enough from in Firefox.
Something that's frustrating to me wrt Safari is my, admittedly edge case, in which the company I work for won't allow using personal Apple IDs on company supplied macs. Apple only allow Safari sync to work between computers with the same Apple ID, which I sort of get, but still that makes it useless to me.
This same-Apple-ID restriction causes other issues too, like not being able to use my iPhone as a webcam on my work mac even though I can use my AirPods on that same mac because reasons.
It’s too bad that Firefox has such a great UX and privacy-focused cloud features like this, yet is being held back by its engine. As a heavy FF user for the last few years it’s become more and more clear that the world just doesn’t care about making sites work on FF and I’m more frequently having to switch to Chrome. My dream is that FF would switch to Chromium while keeping all the great features around the browser engine. But suggesting such a thing is blasphemy in the FF world so we’re stuck with an engine that no one targets any more and isn’t keeping up with modern web APIs more web devs are using.
It's too bad that I can't read the article - because I'm using Firefox and an ad blocker. I get "Something went wrong. Please disable your blocker on How-To Geek"
I'm using Mull, an Android Mobile browser based on Firefox with some privacy tweaks, with uBlock origin enabled, Android set to use NextDNS with even more adblocking, and a VPN. The page loads just fine for me. Maybe you're missing one of the lists that helps with anti-adblocking?
How-To Geek is one of those spam sites that is full of basic tutorials that don't really help with your problem and pollutes your search results for ... anything.
Don't think you lost much, I didn't even try to open the original article.
My experience has been quite different in that I don’t even have Chrome installed on my Windows machine just yet, because FF has been working fine for me for a long time. I like to use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. I don’t use the cloud sync feature myself, because I mostly switch between FF and Mobile Safari and I don’t know if there is a good sync solution, and I’d prefer not to send my usage history and stuff out anyway. I’m sure someone out there - many someones, probably - has painted a number of more or less accurate pictures of who I am using my browsing data anyway.
This assertion doesn't match my experiences. I can't recall the last time a site gave a clear complaint about "we don't support firefox". I remember doing useragent modification 10-15 years ago, but more recently, when I tried to do it (I forget why), it seemed like changing the useragent has gotten less convenient, too (installing an addon feels worse than whatever I used to do). I also have the impression from podcasts maybe, that useragent filtering just isn't the near-source-of-truth it used to be.
Hey look more anticompetitive behavior from Microshit. I can't believe that they get away with requiring you to use Bing and Edge when you search from the Windows task bar either.
The only roadblock I’ve found has been the webserial API, which enables users to flash ESP32/8266 or other devices from webpages. It’s super handy for flashing WLED or ESPHome to devices because you don’t have to install any extra software. As far as I know, it has been marked as a “wontfix” in the Firefox bugtracker as they consider it a harmful feature [0]
I mean, I understand the attractiveness, but it's a super-niche feature that wouldn't really move the needle.
The real problem, imho, is the constant glitching on Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Even if they were really "accidental" (big if), they impact massive amounts of users in their everyday lives, and it takes very little to lose a user forever.
Maybe FF should launch a GMail competitor, and/or promote alternatives to any Google property.
I have issues, but rarely. (but I'm tech savvy... wouldn't want to tell my mom to try a different browser...)
My sense of what sites don't work properly (not necessarily 100% of the time, joy) are some big corporate, non-tech company websites, like Kaiser Permanente's and ADP's sites. My sense of recollection says these cases are frequently experienced as the combination of, "Ugh, gotta log into that stupid bloated benefits/work related site, oh and it's not working... time to try Chrome."
It’s a lot of little things. Just yesterday I was on vanguard and a select box wouldn’t display at all on FF. You start to notice these rendering differences all over the place. Gone are the days a site just flat out won’t work unless it’s specifically using an API FF doesn’t support, but it’s all the small stuff like wondering if a form is working correctly because something seems broken for FF
I very rarely have issues with FF and I've been using it for 10 years or so. If a site doesn't work I'll try agan in a chromium based browser I use as needed but that's it. It's easy to keep one installed for such a use case.
I took a glance at Can I Use what the difference between the last public release of Firefox and Chrome is [1] and they don't really have that big of a difference in the eyes of normal use-cases? Some of these aren't implemented purely because of privacy reasons, the proposals aren't finished yet or complexity [2].
Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].
Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?
Why should Firefox move to an engine that is completely controlled by Google? Firefox's independence is exactly why uBlock Origin will continue to work just as well as it always has, and Chromium-based browser will flounder with MV3.
It's too bad this is always one of the most upvoted comments on every FF thread when it just doesn't reflect reality.. been using Firefox for basically it's entire existence and it just works. It's always worked. Never been significantly slower than Chrome, at least to an extent that it matters, and now it's not slower at all. I don't have Chrome installed on my computer since everything works. What parallel reality do others live in?
Yeah, in most cases sites "break" only because they integrate too much with some ad-tech SDK etc. Which means they break on any browser doing any serious ad-blocking.
I have also been using Firefox since its early days. The only issue I have is trying to share my screen with Google Meet it just does not work. While, not surprising it is a slight annoyance as my company uses Google meet for all of our meetings.
Obviously this is only one anecdote so take it with a grain of salt but my experience with Firefox Sync was abysmal. I had it corrupt my bookmarks db twice in a year of using it. Fixing it required digging into my profile folder on Windows and manually deleting the db file while also disabling sync. Otherwise it would just redownload the corrupted db. It was bad to the point where I couldn’t even make new bookmarks with the corrupted file.
Anyway, it really burned me on FF since. It’s probably fixed now (or at least I hope it is) and I want to go back but given the lack of priority put on FF by Mozilla I’m just nervous to make the change again.
For all its issues, I wouldn’t say iCloud syncing is one of them for Safari. I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs, bookmarks and passwords.
I have the opposite experience. Sometimes I see tabs from some of my devices, sometimes all of them, sometimes a few of the tabs and sometimes all of them. If I want to “hand off” browsing to another device I pretty much always have to use AirDrop.
> I’ve had nothing but a good experience over the past couple years when it comes to syncing tabs
There was a period where it sucked at syncing tabs for me, as it repeatedly showed tabs from other devices that no longer existed. Quitting them from that interface would not work as they would soon be back. I found many reports of the same problem online.
Fortunately it’s been working consistently well for long enough that I can rely on it again.
342 comments
[ 312 ms ] story [ 786 ms ] threadI prefer reading content, especially PDFs, on my computer over my phone. One useful feature Firefox has is the ability to just send a tab to a device. When I am out and about, I would queue up reading papers by sending them from my phone to my computer. When I get home, my browser would have the tabs right there, ready for me to read.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
(Which is true ofc. But still.)
I use it every single day for spawning AWS SSO urls into their dedicated containers, since each url is always of the form console.aws.amazon.com which makes writing rules for it stupid hard
What the heck
I store the .kdbx file in Syncthing (== Dropbox) so it automagically syncs between all my computers and phones. Use the KeepassXC app on computers along with their browser plugins, and the KeepassDX app on Android (idk about iOS).
One advantage of this is that the passwords work across all browsers. If you use FF's password manager, you only get passwords available in Firefox; but with Keepass they work in FF & Chrome & for native android apps & etc. And with the browser plugins it works about as well as the browser's native password managers. It also has support for TOTP 2 factor authentication.
Also I can easily make a copy of the .kdbx file (literally just ctrl-c ctrl-v the file) to save archives of my password db. (That said, over years of having the database open across multiple devices and editing it while open on multiple devices, it's never gotten corrupted)
But whether that is an in-browser password manager or a third-party manager with browser-integration (usually via an extension) probably doesn't matter much.
I also use a label maker to fix the login credentials for shared computers on the backside of their keyboards.
I suspect people like me are the reason my firm is trying so hard to migrate to single sign in instead of dozens of unique passwords which require updates
That's not terrible, depends on the level of physical security you have
> which I then print and post on the wall by my monitor.
That's pretty bad any any passing person or camera can see them
> Both. I like to keep a file in notepad updated with all my corporate passwords
That's the worst of your 3 methods though, but for many attacks is more secure in practice than using chrome/google sharing, especially if the file isn't called "password.txt" or similar.
I absolutely loathe needing to know more than one password per sector of my life - ideally I'd prefer a password manager as they're more flexible.. but SSO is alright too.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32248779
[1] https://www.lancs.live/news/viewers-spot-sellafield-blunder-...
It should not, but you probably should also not be keeping your passwords (only) there, encrypted or no.
Most products are often get grilled here for having closed code parts or similar concerns but when it comes to giving complete audit of their online existence, "meh...". Same folks who criticize canonical (which I disagree strongly with their late practices) only to install chrome as their browser on their systems.
Insert "statistically speaking" wherever needed.
That being said, I'm on Safari instead. Chrome doesn't make me happy.
For Firefox specifically, it's long failed at holding the web back from Chrome and the choice isn't about that anymore. That title has firmly been with Safari for a long time now. Because Safari isn't available on all platforms it leaves not much of a concern to choose a Chromium based browser outside that group who operate solely on principle not 100% of the browser is open source.
I think for a long time Firefox languished a bit too far behind Chromium in many architectural aspects (I remember waiting fooooreeever for Electrolysis then when it came out the browser was significantly slower than Chrom* at the time). This comparison is leaps and bounds better today but it's a bit of a day late, dollar short situation in that it's not better enough to get droves of people to switch over again like the IE vs Firefox era.
The other thing I'll mention is when the topic of browsers comes up people's goto is the last issue they personally had with each. Given the size and complexity of browsers combined with the amount of hardware, OS, and use case variance this tends to feel more akin to people arguing whether lottery numbers skew odd vs even based on their last experience than anything about the actual browsers. Even when the discussion steers towards talk of a specific feature a lot of the time that feature didn't even originate in the browser it's being brought up for.
EDIT: After writing this, I realized I should investigate the claim, because new devices are added just by logging in, not by giving them any sort of password.
In general though, the info is stored on Mozilla's (or an affiliate's) cloud.[0]
1. If you lose your password and didn't setup a separate password recovery code (one time codes), then your data is toast. You can't reset your password via email without wiping your cloud data because mozilla uses your password in a hashing algorithm to store your data.
2. If I recall, you have to setup a 2FA to login on new devices.
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/sync/
*EDIT: revised above to clarify mozilla password reset wipes data unless you have recovery key.
Only sender and receiver (the “ends”) can decrypt the data, ie have the keys. In this case both ends are “you”, and the passphrase is the authentication for new devices. For e2ee to hold, neither the passphrase nor the key can be shared with another party, for instance Mozilla.
> 1. If you lose your password and didn't setup a separate password recovery code (one time codes), then you're toast.
That sounds right, and is similar to password managers. Your data is encrypted as a vault with a key derived from the passphrase. The vault is opaque to anyone without the key. Though you still have to trust the software.
[I edited my comment above to get into more nuance about password reset is possible, but wipes data.]
If you lose your Mozilla account password, you can reset it, but
> Any data you have on the server will be erased when you reset your password (unless you use recovery keys). Your other devices will stop synchronizing unless you update them with the new password.[0]
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ive-lost-my-firefox-syn...
It can’t. I don’t know about FF, but if you can add a device without explicit approval of one of your existing provisioned devices it is what I call Fake E2EE.
You see different providers go to great lengths to do device local encryption etc but due to product requirements (“what if a user loses their device or forgets their passphrase”) they keep a copy of the key, yet slaps the e2ee label on their product. So now it’s just regular encryption at rest with all the risks (subpoenas, rogue employees, company gets acquired, new CEO starts drooling over data broker dollars etc), only with much more technical complexity since data now needs to be read-writable client side by different software versions, increasing the risk of corruption, data loss and bugs.
Password managers with true e2ee actually suffer from these corruption issues from time to time. But that’s a price that must be paid for the e2ee level of security. It’s not for everyone – I wished there was more honesty around this instead of diluting meaningful and precise terms.
Edit: seems like FF has e2ee, see sibling comment.
FF sync "splits" your password into an encryption key and the service password on the client side. The service never sees the key (or real password).
Bitwarden works in a similar way.
There's no off-channel key synchronization. What means that the encryption is only as good as your password. But AFAIK no browser has it anyway, and nearly no sync service.
Firefox sync seems to work by key authorization, that is done by in-channel sharing and user confirmation for PCs and a QR code for phones. It's a quite good process, that looks similar to what you are describing.
I just don't know why I remembered something different.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
Possibly my fault and I need to poke at it a little more but in general I can start a docker container just fine so I feel like its maybe not quite there yet.
EDIT: I guess it was this, though I think it's been broken again more recently? https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/pull/11895
At any rate I've found Firefox on iOS/iPadOS to be surprisingly buggy.. tabs hang and need to be closed, not all bookmarks are synced and/or the ordering changing per above, showing sponsored ads in the new tab shortcuts list and needing a force-close until they go away after being disabled, etc. etc.
I use different machines differently. The laptop I'm typing this on is my "main" browser, I have lots of bookmarks set up in a specific structure. I only use my phone browser when I have to, and it is rarely the same thing I've done before. It has a couple stale bookmarks, I don't care. I use the browser on my iPad even less. My big desktop is where I play with recreational software development, it has lots of bookmarks, but a very different set than my laptop. And my work phone/work laptop are their own things.
It just seems like making every closet door in your house open the same closet, if that where physically possible. There are reasons different things go in different buckets.
No sync please.
Nobody implements proper context switching and privacy from yourself. The only kind of privacy anybody even acknowledges the existence is from 3rd parties.
I don't have a Firefox account and I'm not signed in into any browser on any account. Why does it try to sync things without my permission?
It doesn't. (The interface for enabling it is even a little anxiety-causing.) It doesn't add extra icons anywhere either.
You have some additional software doing that. Do you use a fork from the Mozilla code?
The devices I mention are all in the same local network so maybe they discover each other.
Anyway, there's a post in this thread that explains perfectly why I (or that poster) don't need or want sync. Basically my different machines are used for different purposes so there's no reason to mix bookmarks or move browsing history around. As for credit card numbers... what is this insanity? I don't save credit card numbers anywhere.
I have no idea what you are supposed to expect there.
Call answering from my laptop is the only thing that ever made me rush out and buy a new iPhone that supported it :)
FWIW, Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, and Mozilla doesn't broker in your data.
I still use Firefox though, it's the best cross-platform browser overall.
[1] https://palant.info/2023/08/29/chrome-sync-privacy-is-still-...
[2] https://palant.info/2018/03/13/can-chrome-sync-or-firefox-sy...
I left because it was a lot worse than my main two other options on MacOS at the time, and they’d not followed through on the things that made me like it when I adopted it, so I hadn’t really loved it since late 1.x or early 2.x.
I haven’t gone back because there’s no compelling reason to switch back from Safari.
It is still my mod-downloading browser on my Windows gaming PC.
Firefox is missing a ton of very useful stuff for some people, such as some audio API or AppleScript¹. The latter absolutely kills it for any kind of automation on macOS. It’s the sole major browser on macOS without support for AppleScript but Mozilla people think that’s just a power user feature. I know because I talked with devs at various points, in person and online, and was given the same answer. Thing is, power users create automations for non-power users. When the latter want to use a tool from the former and the answer is “you can’t, Firefox doesn’t support it”, there’s another user lost.
On a personal anecdotal level, I also don’t find it that stable. Just recently I wanted to try an extension and decided to do so on Firefox. After a while it just removed the extension from the list and it was seemingly impossible to get back, even after reinstalling. Every time I give Firefox a try, I am disappointed.
I’m glad it works for you and many other people, but the answer as to why it isn’t more popular is that your experience is far from universal.
¹ Whose bug report has been open for 22 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125419
Nowadays they've caught up on speed pretty well on desktop, but are still behind on security, and years behind on security on Android.
Personally, I just like features like tab groups, and hate the Foundation's politics, so it was easy to drop it back when they said we need more than deplatforming. The competition has better features, is actually developing new features, and is focused on toolmaking instead of activism. Funnily enough, it shows up in the products.
Caveat is that I've linked to the old Python one, and they've got a new Rust one, but it didn't support SQLite the last time I had checked.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
This same-Apple-ID restriction causes other issues too, like not being able to use my iPhone as a webcam on my work mac even though I can use my AirPods on that same mac because reasons.
Luckily for me, I'm super happy with Firefox.
Don't think you lost much, I didn't even try to open the original article.
Also, what modern web APIs Firefox doesn't support?
[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336
The real problem, imho, is the constant glitching on Google properties like Gmail and YouTube. Even if they were really "accidental" (big if), they impact massive amounts of users in their everyday lives, and it takes very little to lose a user forever.
Maybe FF should launch a GMail competitor, and/or promote alternatives to any Google property.
My sense of what sites don't work properly (not necessarily 100% of the time, joy) are some big corporate, non-tech company websites, like Kaiser Permanente's and ADP's sites. My sense of recollection says these cases are frequently experienced as the combination of, "Ugh, gotta log into that stupid bloated benefits/work related site, oh and it's not working... time to try Chrome."
Why would Firefox need to change to Chromium engine? The only websites I notice that don't work with Firefox is because of user-agent targetting or just putting 5-second time-outs in Youtube code on non-chrome webbrowsers [3].
Can you give some examples of websites not working on Firefox?
[1] https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+120%2Cfirefox+121&compar...
[2] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
[3] https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-seemingly-intentionally-...
Wouldn't it be better to build according to standards - rather than browsers? Do that and any site will work in Firefox.
Aside from that, no "chrome only" issues you describe.
I can watch the bookmark bar dissapear almost in real time on other machines (eg. notebook) when I use it. I do not sync passwords, though.
Anyway, it really burned me on FF since. It’s probably fixed now (or at least I hope it is) and I want to go back but given the lack of priority put on FF by Mozilla I’m just nervous to make the change again.
There was a period where it sucked at syncing tabs for me, as it repeatedly showed tabs from other devices that no longer existed. Quitting them from that interface would not work as they would soon be back. I found many reports of the same problem online.
Fortunately it’s been working consistently well for long enough that I can rely on it again.