this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Firefox and Safari are the sole exception to the monoculture that is the Blink engine. Most developers just use whatever comes in the latest Chromium and call it a day - for them accommodating for less than 20% of the market when they can simply join the 80% is wasting time in the long tail of the Pareto rule. Which is why I loathe Google having so much de facto power on the W3C.
I try to do my part to resist the monoculture by using Firefox everywhere I can, from mobile to my work computers. It's true that I do run into sites that just break because everybody uses Chrome. Well, I'm somebody who isn't using it. I will be the change I want to see in the world, even if in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.
I love Firefox and have used it for years, but lately it’s development seems troubled. Features aren’t working like they used to, and increasingly they are throwing more bloat at the whole thing.
I worry it’s not long for this world at this rate.
~~Oh yeah, and if the desktop Firefox could just fucking sync my passwords to mobile, that would be great.~~
Gort helped get my logins synced, it’s even working on iOS now, bless this place.
My desktop Firefox syncs my passwords to Firefox for Android quite well.
However, yeah, I do think that Firefox's development over the years has gone a bit awry with the attempt to out-Chrome Chrome. It's still the best browser out there, though.
I wish mine would, I just spent the last three days updating 244 passwords to be more secure, and I deleted all the old ones in Firefox desktop, imported the new ones via a file into Firefox desktop, and it’s been three days and they’ve yet to show up on iOS or android mobile devices.
No amount of clicking sync anywhere does anything, lol.
Ouch, that's not good.
Have you tried force stopping and deleting the cache in Firefox for Android? Maybe you might need to clear its data and reinstall Firefox for Android again, which might force Sync to work. It's possible your profile is corrupted. You might well lose some settings if Sync doesn't repopulate, but it seems that you've already lost stuff due to Sync not working.
Yeah I tried that.
Cache first, then data, then uninstall.
Just nada.
I’ve tried logging in with the credentials manually, signs in fine but no sync.
I’ve tried logging on fresh in mobile, using that “scan to add another Firefox device” setting on desktop. Still nada.
Is there a possibility that it's an issue with the desktop Firefox? Maybe it's sending "garbage" to Sync due to profile corruption, etc. The passwords in your desktop Firefox work fine? Maybe try clearing its cache, if you haven't already, or go nuclear by creating a new profile, then set it up as you want, and adding your passwords, then using that new profile to see if you can sync your passwords, etc. Sorry, but other than that drastic action, I'm out of ideas.
One other thing, do your browser history and bookmarks sync?
Damn bro, you’re better than tech support.
Alright you’ve inspired me to try nuking it on desktop since I only really care about the passwords anyways and I have access to those in a CSV file.
Brb lol
*edit: okay nuking the desktop version and clean signing in with my account fixed it for Android! Thanks bro! It didn’t do shit for ~~iOS but that’s irrelevant since all the same passwords are stored in iCloud.~~ (iOS just took a little longer to sync over!) This is great, so appreciate you taking so much time to help.
Switch to Librewolf and Mull
I’d never heard of this so I had to look it up.
God bless you for sharing this knowledge with me.
NP. Mull is basically the same for android.
Librewolf is great but the fact they make it so ridiculously difficult to make google the default search engine is soo dumb.
They are definitely sending a message
Is it specifically about Google? I don't use it for years and other engines are really easy. Try to use searxNG then.
@henfredemars @csolisr I feel like most people complaining about Firefox “being slow” haven’t tried it in 5 years or run Chrome on a machine that has enough resources to run a million tabs in both browsers, simultaneously 😅 Firefox is a fantastic browser, with brilliant dev tools, separate spaces for social media accounts without sharing cookies etc. Everything works perfectly, aside from the occasional website that blocks browsers by user agent like it’s 2003
Windows is such a shitty platform, with each update they force you to use their browser it's insane, the ammount of popups and shit they push onto you it's just crazy. If you browse in windows they sometimes give you web results that you can only see inside of Bing where you get 10 popups to get Edge, now they are introducing some AI Copilot assistant built in into windows that also forces you to use Bing and install Edge in every step you take.
If you want to use Firefox I highly recommend using Linux since Windows is spying to you anway so it's not even worth bothering with not using Edge on there.
I have no idea what Windows does since I use Linux exclusively at home and macOS exclusively at work, but this sounds... unlikely.
Could you clarify a few things?
Do you mean using the system search thing that's usually used for launching programs? Or so you mean something built in to apps? Or Cortana search assistant (or whatever they call it now)?
Can you change the default search engine? I use Firefox w/ DuckDuckGo, and I've never used any kind of OS search (I disable it when possible).
Does Windows reach inside Firefox somehow?
And yeah, I get that Microsoft is spying on its users, that's a given, but I don't see how that translates to switching OSes just to use a browser. There are plenty of other reasons to use Firefox aside from some privacy protections (and Firefox really isn't all that private by default, it just blocks some cookies), such as:
What. I'm no Windows fanboy but this is FUD.
Yes, I am sadly well aware of the prevailing situation.
But on the other hand, by and large complete cross-browser HTML compliance is not that hard though. A couple extra couple hours to verify your code works everywhere instead of just the one engine isn't all that huge a sacrifice. I really feel like probably 9 out of 10 companies are putting up barriers to Firefox just because they are lazy not because it doesn't work (or couldn't work with a couple tweaks.)
Most aren't writing fully by hand. They are using automated scripts/snippets provided by their tools.
Good point, I'll admit.