My favourite feature of Firefox is multi-account containers -- great if you have multiple online identities.
I use firefox profiles for this. Its an old old feature but the command line options for it still work.
Firefox Sync actually works
141–150 of 343 posts
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#142Yes, 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 sh…
is it a good idea to use password managers built into web browsers? (vs using a password manager from some third party? bw/1p)
I don't think so, but since browsers offer this option it should be extremely stable.
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#143Passwords belong in a dedicated password manager. Besides those, I don't understand what I'd want to sync. I've even disabled syncing tabs between sessions on the same machine.
The last thing I need is for what I was doing yesterday to distract me from what I'm trying to do today.
What I want in a browser is a dumb box that starts up as a blank slate every time, renders HTML and JavaScript, and is indistinguishable from all of the other dumb boxes that do so.
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#144One of the things that I like about Firefox is that it lets you right click on websites that disable right clicking by holding down shift. Reminds you that the browser should be the user's agent and not the website's.
This one's niche, but Firefox's dev tools also let web developers see which font is actually being used. Chrome's dev tools only show you what font is supposed to be in use, but doesn't tell you if it had to resort to a fallback font.
Are you sure? I think the computed tab in Chrome devtools shows the actual used font.
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#145Configuring 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…
> I understand why surveillance capitalists like the idea, makes their lives a little easier.
FWIW, Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted, and Mozilla doesn't broker in your data.
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#146Many years ago, I wanted to use Firefox sync to migrate profile and bookmarks from one OS to another.
I don't know if it's still the case, but at the time there was an automatic periodic and a manually triggered sync, with a button and sync icon (like ). I triggered the manual sync by clicking on the button. The icon spinned for a few seconds and then stopped.
I interpreted this as the sync being finished, formatted the drive, installed the new OS, installed Firefox, set up sync, and waited for the profile/bookmarks to arrive.
Nothing happened.
Apparently (as per their issue report response) at the time, the spinning of the sync icon was only showing that the data had been written somewhere on disc and registered for the next periodic sync. The button did NOT trigger the sync itself.
This was very frustrating and a good reminder to never rely on a single sync/backup. Also an interesting example of bad UX. Dropbox was already around at the time IIRC, and its stopping rotating sync icon indicated the actual sync to be finished, as one would expect.
Again, this was many years ago, and I think I remember reading that they reimplemented sync from scratch some time later.
I'm still using Firefox, but not their sync. Maybe time to give it another chance.
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#147It’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…
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"
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.
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#148Passwords belong in a dedicated password manager. Besides those, I don't understand what I'd want to sync. I've even disabled syncing tabs between sessions on the same machine. The last thing I need is for what I was doing yesterday to distract me from what I'm trying to do today. What I want in a browser is a dumb box that starts up as a blank slate every time, renders HTML and JavaScript, and is indistinguishable f…
You might want all the configuration you did to make your browser a dumb box to be synced. For example, disabling showing recently viewed pages on the new tab page.
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#149Chrome's sync also "just works" for me shrug
Re: Firefox Sync actually works
#150One of the things that I like about Firefox is that it lets you right click on websites that disable right clicking by holding down shift. Reminds you that the browser should be the user's agent and not the website's.
I wish you could stop websites hijacking the quick find key (/) too.