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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, the first thing I do is log in to Sync, which is (/claims to be) encrypted so Mozilla can't read your settings/data, and everything Just Works TM.

Plus, I get the added benefit of syncing all my passwords and being able to send pages to my phone, though I would quite like it if it were faster (I've had cases where the pages took days to arrive).

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Sync can also be self hosted.

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver

I love firefox but this is one hell of an annoyance I would beat author with a large trump. A hellofablob of dependencies etc. Like it was deliberately build to not self host it (and no I dont want docker).

I really really really hate it for almost 10 years. There was a project rewritting it in go but was abandoned and probably the next thing I will develop will be a replacement .

Given it's written in python 2.7, it's due for a rewrite if I understand.

> and no I dont want docker

Forgive me, but it sounds like you just want to be unhappy about the distribution, because that solves your problem pretty well.

I have freebsd server and jails. Ergo, docker doesnt solve my problem.

maybe not deliberately, but i can imagine that it wasn't built with self-hosting in mind, until someone (from inside or outside) pushed for a self-hosting option.

is there a documented API? how much does it really take to sync? if it's browser encrypted it would really be just login, push or pull a blob. how hard can that be?

FYI you can manually trigger synchronization in both the mobile and desktop browsers, the option isn't buried very deep in either and is the only workaround I've found to avoid delays!

Edit: on mobile it's under Hamburger > Settings > Firefox Account

That's what I usually do, but sometimes I send links from the phone to the desktop so I remember to read them there, and if they never appear I just forget about them.

My problem with sync on mobile is that it appears to be impossible to manually sync the data when the phone's general sync setting is set to off (When I want no apps to sync). My email software let me manually check for new email... this appears to be a Firefox bug.

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