Firefox sync on Chrome

Hello,

So it is a reeeeeeaaaaally dumb question, still gonna do it. Is it possble to have a chromium based browser to sync with a mozilla account rather than google?

Why? because I prefer having mozilla tracking my data instead of google / microsoft. I mean, I use FF as de facto, but sometimes I still need to use chrome for some websites that ‘funnily’ do not work on FF.

So, it would be nice to sync both browsers to the one company that I trust.

Thx.

And yes, confinement is doing shennanigans to my brain.

3 Likes

First of all, that is a very good question and the reason why third-party products exist that do exactly that, e.g. xBrowserSync.

There doesn’t seem to be an implementation or extension for Chromium, yet.

There has been an implementation for Firefox Sync for Epiphany, but apart from that, Firefox Sync hasn’t got a lot of attention outside of Mozilla.

Is it possible? Yes, it is. Has it been implemented already? No, not yet.

Hi @Daemonicvs, welcome to Mozilla.

Sync is designed to help move bookmarks, passwords and other data between copies of Firefox, but let’s look at the issue you raise a different way.

What are the websites that are not working right?

I don’t know if there is an add-on to make this on Chrome, but your question comes in good timing, since we have just launched the second phase of the “Hunt from home” campaign:

Probably you will find sites that act funny on Firefox and can help understand what’s not working :slight_smile:

1 Like

Engineer on sync here.

We’ve considered it, I think one of the other engineers even had a rough demo at one point. One big issue is that it’s very hard (almost impossible) to do sync without either:

  • integrating into the storage layer of the browser
  • corrupting user data

This isn’t a great situation to be in. That said, there are valid use cases, and maybe the edge cases don’t really matter in practice, e.g. maybe we can accept the corruption and handle it on a case-by-case basis (or maybe we could bite the bullet and do it via dropbox-style rescanning).

Anyway, someone very smart, dedicated, and motivated could probably port some of the code from https://github.com/mozilla/application-services/tree/master/components/sync15 (I suspect merely compiling it to wasm wouldn’t work, although we’d almost certainly accept patches to change that). Then, https://github.com/mozilla/dogear probably could be compiled to wasm to work in this manner, and could handle e.g. bookmark merging.

This is not trivial by any means, but it’s certainly possible. If you aren’t intimidated, feel free to give this a shot and reach out in chat.mozilla.org if you have questions.

1 Like

Ok, I was not expecting it to be a thing.

I followed the link, and that is basically my issues, sometimes the ‘sharing to FB, reddit, whatever’ do not work, posting or uploading images fail, etc;

the simple things that are annoying.

So, nukeador, I signed myself for the hunting, happy to help;

tcsc, I would, but that is waaaaay above my computing power xD.

Tnx everyone.

1 Like

There is no benefits for Mozilla to support such a plugin, it will use Mozilla resources (servers, storage and etc.) to provide free and private sync to other browser vendors and help them to get more profit. Google’s sync generates huge revenue by using the sync data for advertisement, so they might be happy to support Google sync account in all browsers, but there are no advantages in that for Mozilla’s sync platform.

1 Like

How about a simplified version, that syncs the things most to represent in all browsers: bookmarks, open tabs and maybe credentials (all optional)?

I came here because I have a few resource-limited machines on which FF is just not usable but an efficient Chrome-based browser like Slimjet is. I’d like to keep FF as my main browser though, in part because FF ESR is the only browser still supported on my main computer which I’m keep under Mac OS X 10.9 as long as possible.

I think you’re wrong. It could also be a paid feature for non mozilla browsers. I think there’s value in storing my personal data and passwords in a secure and privacy respecting server, owned by a non-profit organization such as mozilla. That’s why Firefox Lockwise exists. A Chrome / chromium / Edge extension could help Mozilla gain traction, expecially if that feature is free with Firefox and paid with third party browsers. Having the feature as an extension could also help in a enterprise environment, where users can’t usually choose which browser to use. Also: Firefox is losing marketshare because people want to have their data synced between their mobile and their browsers, and it’s easier for them to just install and use Chrome instead. If mozilla care about its userbase should absolutely provide a feature like this.

With the recent news about Google pulling it’s sync features from Chromium it would be a good idea for Mozilla to develop this functionality quickly and enable Firefox sync on Chromium. It would really help Linux distributions. It would help the users to stay on Chromium and not go full Google Chrome. This could be a paid service too.
It would help a lot for users that want to stay in the Mozilla ecosystem.

I’m searching for a way to sync Chrome bookmarks with Firefox on other devices. Because Firefox still does not support two fingers swipe to back and forward on Windows 10 through the browser history like other browsers. I don’t want to install extensions with < 1000 downloads and unsafe permissions. The only safe way I found is to replace Firefox everywhere.

事实上,已经有类似的第三方同步扩展了,而且还是开源的~


它并没有自己的同步服务器,而是通过 Nextcloud、自己搭建的WebDAV 或 Google Drive 来进行同步的。
另外说下,这是跨浏览器的,在不同扩展商店中都有
In fact, there are similar third-party synchronous extensions, and they are open source~

It doesn’t have its own synchronization server, but uses nextcloud, its own WebDAV or Google drive to synchronizee.

In addition, this is cross browser and can be found in different extension stores

In fact, there are similar third-party synchronous extensions, and they are open source~

It doesn’t have its own synchronization server, but uses nextcloud, its own WebDAV or Google drive to synchronize.。

In addition, this is cross browser and can be found in different extension stores

1 Like

Well will this sync the Bookmark tags? I think it won’t

can we use the same idea as firefox for iOS’s sync implementation? firefox on iOS has to use WKWebView to get the rendering correct, would it be the same to use same logic to build a chromium based firefox?
A lot of online doc apps did not work well with firefox.

I am an avid fan of Firefox because I don’t like Google’s data sharing policies.
That being said I use various OS’s Windows FreeBSD Debian Ubuntu Kali MacOS and a couple of months ago reading email on Hotmail/Outlook live and Google with Firefox on FreeBSD and Debian either became incredibly slow and/or crashed the browser. The crashes have seemed to stop but can’t read email on hotmail this morning with Debian/Firefox, I can see the list but they don’t open. I installed chromium and got it to run as root/bad sysadmin I know/ and it’s much faster. So I know hotmail and gmail are always changing up their scripts but it would be good if this gets fixed. Still an avid supporter of Mozilla. Thanks!

I actually use chrome for all my searches, cos it’s pretty easy for me. Mozilla Firefox doesn’t load well on my system. The images don’t get displayed. But on chrome browser, it’s automatic.