This might not align with the goals of Mozilla, but what I would love to see is for Firefox Sync to be extracted so that:
- It can be integrated into Google Chrome on desktop operating systems.
- It can be provided as a stand-alone app on iOS so that I can:
a) “Share” links to this hypothetical stand-alone Sync app from Safari in order to send them to Firefox Sync bookmarks storage.
b) Copy username and password from the stand-alone Sync app when using Safari on iOS.
It might sound like a peculiar setup but bear with me.
The situation is that I run Firefox as the main browser on my laptop, Chromium as main browser on desktop and Safari as main browser on iOS.
For a long time I’ve used Firefox Sync as the “main” storage of passwords, and I would go into Firefox settings and copy username and password from there on desktop and mobile. Even though I store the passwords and usernames in the other browsers on first login it’s still a bit cumbersome whenever I add a new account, log in for the first time, or change a password.
Recently on desktop I started using KeePassXC on my desktop and the browser plugins for it in order to make it a bit smoother. Today I installed MiniKeePass on iOS and am going to find a good way of keeping it in sync with my desktop. In the end though, KeePassXC is not quite what I want, whereas the core of Firefox Sync is exactly what I want.
As for my bookmarks, they are all over the place. Some in Firefox, some in Chromium, some in Safari, some in exported files or copies of old homedirs, and a lot of bookmarks probably lost at various points in time. Again, the core of Firefox Sync is what I want.
The predecessor to FF Sync was the open source Weave which you could self host. It was WebDAV-based I believe. Sadly they deprecated it in favor of FF Sync.
EDIT: Forgot to mention Weave was exciting because you could integrate with other browsers. And there was a Dolphin add-on which did just that.
Check out https://lockbox.firefox.com/, which is an iOS app that syncs with Firefox Sync, and integrates with the iOS 12 password management interface. It doesn't do bookmarks, but it should fulfill part "b)" of your requirements nicely. It's still in Beta according to https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/firefox-lockbox but it works very well for me.
Aren't both Chrome and Firefox's sync protocols open? At least, the Firefox Sync server is still self-hostable and open source, and at least the client side of Chrome's sync is open source since Chromium can sync as well...
I've never understood why someone didn't implement a Firefox Sync extension for Chrome or vice-versa. Is it technical or are people opinionated enough about browsers that no one has the personal need to develop such extensions?
For firefox sync on chrome: It’s completely possible, but the crypto is enough of a pain in the ass to deter most people.
(It’s also going to be very difficult to implement a robust sync system this way, integration with the underlying storage is all but required for that)
In my opinion, crypto is the easy part. I think the only problem I had when I worked on my own Accounts&Sync re-implementation (a crude hack, I admit) was some MAC-related issue with BrowserID, where different (old) Firefox versions had generated different assertions. Don't really remember what it was.
The real problem is data model is significantly different. It's possible, but a lot of boring work, designing the appropriate transformations.
- It can be integrated into Google Chrome on desktop operating systems.
- It can be provided as a stand-alone app on iOS so that I can:
a) “Share” links to this hypothetical stand-alone Sync app from Safari in order to send them to Firefox Sync bookmarks storage.
b) Copy username and password from the stand-alone Sync app when using Safari on iOS.
It might sound like a peculiar setup but bear with me.
The situation is that I run Firefox as the main browser on my laptop, Chromium as main browser on desktop and Safari as main browser on iOS.
For a long time I’ve used Firefox Sync as the “main” storage of passwords, and I would go into Firefox settings and copy username and password from there on desktop and mobile. Even though I store the passwords and usernames in the other browsers on first login it’s still a bit cumbersome whenever I add a new account, log in for the first time, or change a password.
Recently on desktop I started using KeePassXC on my desktop and the browser plugins for it in order to make it a bit smoother. Today I installed MiniKeePass on iOS and am going to find a good way of keeping it in sync with my desktop. In the end though, KeePassXC is not quite what I want, whereas the core of Firefox Sync is exactly what I want.
As for my bookmarks, they are all over the place. Some in Firefox, some in Chromium, some in Safari, some in exported files or copies of old homedirs, and a lot of bookmarks probably lost at various points in time. Again, the core of Firefox Sync is what I want.