Extension for Firefox Sync in Chrome?

Storage & Syncing
#1

Hi all,

Unfortunately the IT team at my company are going to stop providing Firefox as a browser option as we upgrade to Windows 10 :frowning:

My options will be IE, Edge and Chrome. Since Chrome is probably my best option out of these three, I wondered if anyone knew of a Chrome extension which could be used to sync with my Firefox Account, so I can still share tabs, browsing history, etc?

I did look in the Chrome store but I can’t find such an extension.

Is such an extension even possible? Is it permitted by the Firefox team to use third party apps to sync with the Firefox account?

I don’t know how many other companies are doing the same as me, but it may become more and more common.

This actually sounds like a perfect use-case for a Test Pilot project, but unfortunately that’s now disbanded. (Note although my avatar is the Test Pilot logo I just chose it because I like it, not because I worked directly with them).

Would this be difficult to do?

Cheers :smile:

1 Like
#2

Is it permitted by the Firefox team to use third party apps to sync with the Firefox account?

It’s not explicitly forbidden; however I’m not aware of any good plugin for syncing with Chrome in practice.

Would this be difficult to do?

Definitely non-trivial. We’ve been working on some reusable components for accessing data in Firefox Sync:

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

But they’re currently written in Rust and targetting native applications, not Chrome plugins which would need to be written in JS. But if you’re interested in finding out what would be involved in integrating with Firefox Sync, that repo is probably a good place to start.

#3

Kinda off-topic, but actually epiphany (aka GNOME Web, the web browser of GNOME), supports it. So it does seem to be allowed. :smiley:

Totally strange reason though. Firefox works perfectly fine there.
I hope you can maybe convince them to change their decision…

#4

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for getting back to me with that info. It looks like making a Chrome plugin for this will be beyond me, especially with the spare time I have. Good to hear that you’re working on making sync usable more widely though.

I also asked on SuMo and they suggested the obvious - I should use a portable version of Firefox! https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1255784

I believe that this will work and it’s the best solution as I get to continue using Firefox. However, I am interested in the idea of using Firefox Sync on other platforms where Firefox is not available so in this case I will look at what’s possible with the reusable components.

Cheers :smiley:

#5

@rugkx Yes I know Firefox works fine on Windows 10, I use it myself at home. I think the reason is that they don’t want the added demand of testing the company’s internal apps to make sure they always work on Firefox as well as the other three browsers.

It’s a shame, but it’s a business decision. Using portable Firefox will help me keep work and personal web-stuff separate, which will be helpful (until now I’ve been using profiles).

Cheers :slight_smile:

#6

Again, technically said, Firefox is available on nearly all platforms, i.e. OSes. :blush:

#7

The key point is nearly. e.g. there’s no native client for SailfishOS or UBPorts Ubuntu Touch.

Anyway for now I don’t use these.

Cheers :slight_smile: