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Comment by corty | Hacker News Reader

Also, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide proper self-hosted options.

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I thought it was possible to host your own sync server for Firefox. Is this no longer true?

It is theoretically true. They have changed the protocol at least three times, there are no user-accessible settings (just about:config) to point at your own sync server, there is no documentation. And at their rate of breaking stuff, your sync server will be obsolete as soon as you get it running. Happened to me, will never waste time on it again.

And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-old python, tons of code smells. I'd wager it is not what they are using themselves.

Chances are it is the version they're using themselves, too.

Proprietary software is often way worse than any of the OSS projects.

Sync is optional, and you can use a custom server and self host it.

Last I checked, self-hosted Firefox sync uses Python 2.7, with dead GitHub activity. Not quite the best state for Firefox sync.

I believe they have shifted to a Rust implementation.

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

Ok, I'm relieved to see that this exists. Thank you.

And it's end to end encrypted unlike Google and Microsoft's offerings

Firefox Sync is open source: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver

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