My main gripe with Firefox at the moment is Sync. It just doesn’t sync everything you need. My Firefox profile is highly customized, with a lot of extensions that all have their own complex config. Sync will keep the actual extensions synced, but not their settings. You have to rely on manual import/export features provided by the extensions themselves. Some first party extensions (eg Containers) don’t even give you that option.
You can get some of that by syncing your profile folder directly, but it’s very fragile. It hasn’t played nice with the generic folder syncing tools I’ve tried.
I think this is painful because Firefox really encourages customization, and it’s really useful! I just don’t want to have to keep track of that customization on every device. I trust Firefox Sync’s security model and want to do more with it.
Would be helpful if the Firefox store made it clear if extensions support this. Also, why do some first-party extensions ignore it??
Also: there are other things sync still misses, like config.
IMO this is quite unfortunate, and is mostly a consequence of the implementation of extension storage sync being done separately from the rest of sync (which in retrospect was a mistake, but at the time that wasn't clear). Also, the limits are copy-pasted directly from the limits chrome places on sync, so it's possible there are compatibility concerns as well.
For config (assuming you mean prefs in about:config), you can add your own prefs to be synced with about:config. If you add a new boolean pref with a value of true using the pattern `services.sync.prefs.sync.<pref you want to sync here>` it will be synced. e.g. to sync `browser.foo.bar` you'd create `services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.foo.bar`.
Disclaimer: I work on Firefox sync.
[0]: In the future this may be more complex, and you may need to flip an additional pref to get this behavior for non-default prefs.
And userChrome/Content.css... looks like I’ll need to dropbox those.
Editing css was essential to make the switch from Vivaldi to FF - yesterday! Getting TreestyleTab et al. to feel like Vivaldi with vertical tabs required some fiddling: sidebar without menu, hidden top tabs, darker text color, etc.
In any case, it’s my new daily driver and I'm quite satisfied so far. Even set DDG as the default while at it.
Syncing them with dropbox and symlinking does sound to me to be the most reasonable.
Glad you're satisfied other than that!
I just assumed that this behavior would apply to everything once I turned sync on, and then was disappointed when it didn’t work. I had no idea it was an optional feature.
I guess it doesn’t fit the key-value paradigm, but this feature would be a lot more discoverable if there was a “sync?” Attribute next to each about:config item.
A checkbox like you describe was actually discussed in the past, but at this point it’s unlikely. The current design of letting any synced machine change any pref on any remote machine (effectively) has dubious security implications, and has gained an additional hoop you must jump through in nightly.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file
Alternatively every about:config option has a corresponding option that enables sync for it. But that gets messy with many options.
https://superuser.com/questions/466291/firefox-sync-aboutcon...
That's exactly what I did, except I just forked the ghacks-user.js user.js file with the changes I needed
I then made a desktop branch, and an android branch.
https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx-desktop
https://github.com/dngray/ghacks-user.js/tree/fx-android
The main reason I'll never use Chrome is because on Android that means no extensions whatsoever, meaning I'd have to give up uBlock and uMatrix. It's also why I wouldn't buy an iPhone (Firefox on iOS isn't allowed to have extensions).
A user.js file can be deployed on Android https://github.com/ghacksuserjs/ghacks-user.js/wiki/1.6-Fire... (I use the non-rooted instructions).
On my desktop I have it hooked in with my bootstrap script. I use Yadm https://yadm.io/
#!/usr/bin/env bash
firefox() {
local -n branches=$1
local b p d="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/firefox/ghacks-user.js
for p in "${!branches[@]}"
do
b=${branches["$p"]}
printf 'Configuring "%s" on "%s"\n' "$p" "$b"
ln -sf "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME"/firefox/chrome/userChrome.css ~/.mozilla/firefox/"$p"/chrome/userChrome.css
git --git-dir="$d/.git" --work-tree="$d" checkout "$b" &&
cp "$d/user.js" ~/.mozilla/firefox/"$p"/user.js
done
}
firefox_data_path="mozilla/firefox.json"
declare -A fx_profiles
while read -r profile; read -r branch; do
fx_profiles[$profile]=$branch
done < <(jq -r '.[] | .profile, .branch' "$template_data_path/$firefox_data_path")
firefox fx_profiles
[
{
"profile": "user.default",
"branch": "fx-desktop"
}
]Containers is one of my favourite add-ons, and I have it highly customized. But I have to set it up everytime from scratch on a different computer - there's no sync even though Containers is from Mozilla themselves!
Yeah this is exactly the problem.
I was lamenting the lack of sync support for the Multi-account Containers add-on.
I haven't used Chrome since FF 67 and I'm not missing it.
Except for when they briefly broke all the plugins.
Some websites just don't work on FF, so I have a chrome installation. Even a bare-bones (only 1Password and uBlock O) Chrome feels much slower than FF. Page loads in FF are near-imperceptible, but Chrome has blatantly obvious page-blanks during loading.
It really has come a long way, and I'm really looking forward to servo.
I remember after Quantum pages would render HTML so fast and asynchronously the CSS hadnt loaded just yet. Then a split second would occur where the CSS would kick in and the page would be styled.
if you are talking about buttons next to the address bar, like the home button, then you can customize that area and let it look nearly identical to Chrome.
On some sites FF is slower, but these tend to be Google properties or giant Enterprise shitshow behemoths (jira)
A couple weeks ago I made another try to switch back to FF, and I have found the experience to be very pleasant this time; desktop FF on both Windows and MacOS are, for me, better than Chrome. I recommend others give Firefox a try.
(There are a few reasons why you might want to: Privacy, fighting mono-culture, recent decisions by Google to neuter ad blocking addons, a general aversion to the power of the largest tech companies, just chasing the latest and fastest browser, a fondness for novelty or contrarianism. Some of those reasons may resonate; others may not, but if any of them do, give it a shot!)