P2P version of Firefox Sync

It’s an idea I had, nothing more and I have nearly no ability to contribute to it besides telling you about it. I just thought it might be one of the easier tasks that could be added to Syncthing’s usecases besides syncing regular files. Maybe it’s a lot to early to talk about ideas like this…

Thanks for your work btw!

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you can set up your own sync server, use a sync plugin for owncloud or simply use Syncthing to sync your Firefox profiles

I know, but that’s not P2P. Not needing a server is Syncthing’s advantage I’d like to use. I’d be surprised if that worked with Android as well… Does it? Besides that: That’s not noobproof. A noobproof solution could make Firefox users use Syncthing and Mozilla promote it as an alternative to using their or your own server.

i think what youre talking about is daemonizing syncthing so any app could package it inside, giving the option to auto backup your app info to their servers, or have multiple instances of the app backup to each other.

do i have this right?

i think this might be possible in the future, it stretches the original intent of syncthing a little bit, and i know calmh is pretty strict about mission creep. I would want to see encryption implemented first anyway, especially if backing up user info to the servers provided by the app developers, which i suspect most people using a feature like this will do.

I’m not sure I get what you’re saying, but I think I mean exactly the opposite. I want to use Firefox Sync without a server by using Syncthing on all my devices.

sounds like all you have to do is take whatever user info files firefox is saving locally, and have syncthing copy those into the directory on another machine, and hopefully that would be enough to keep your profiles sync’d?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data

this might be a good place to start

There are some issues though, so it might not work 100% of the time due to firefox using memory mapped files which change content but do not update modification time and so on.

I think I’d know how to do that (at least for non-Android devices) so I’m just partly looking for a solution. It’s more like a suggestion to cooperate with Firefox by officially implementing this feature for the benefit of Syncthing and the more privacy aware Firefox users without a server. Maybe it’d make more sense to implement that in Firefox… Either way, collaboration would be beneficial. The long term result could be a Syncthing API for any software to use for similar services. But as I said. It’s just an idea. I know nothing about APIs, just read it somewhere and hope it is what I think it is :smiley:

UPDATE: I set up Linux several times in the last weeks and I realized that in contrast to the time before Synthing the basic setup can be done by just installing Syncthing and setting up a few folders. My next step was to enable Firefox Sync and setting up mail accounts in Thunderbird. Wouldn’t it be great if this could somehow be implemented as well?

I mentioned something similar on ind.ie, where I felt it was more appropriate, but that is no longer the case. I think it’d end up being something like a Firefox extension which implements the block protocol. I agree that it would make sense for Firefox to do something like that by default. Maybe mention it to them?

Well sure, that would make Firefox implement parts of Synthing. I was thinking of it more like a way to expand Syncthing step by step. I never made mockup images, maybe I should try that when I have more time. Think of it like you install Syncthing and there’s a new level above the current Web GUI or let’s say chapters on the left like

  • Sync Folders (the current functionality)
  • Firefox Sync
  • Thunderbird Profiles
  • Add services…