On 22/03/2018 6:13 am, James Sundquist wrote:
Hi,
I asked for input from a Nextcloud Bookmarks dev in this thread. Hope
it is helpful.
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/bring-firefox-sync-back/103
There is a huge amount of misinformation in that thread. We'd welcome
the Nextcloud devs talking to us here to get actual facts instead of the
FUD that seems to dominate now.
I think, as was pointed out before and has lead me to creating floccus,
that, while hosting your own firefox sync server is nice and a nextcloud
app that does that would be useful to many, we would be, once again, at
the mercy of mozilla since we basically replicate infrastructure that
they probably perceive not as an API or standard that needs to be
maintained, but as a private service that they can change whenever they
like.
To be frank, the fact you want to integrate with Firefox at all does put
you at the mercy of Mozilla to some degree.
Also, it would be largely impossible to write an effective sync client
today using only webextension APIs and I doubt that will ever be
possible in the future either - for example, our current bookmark
syncing has custom SQL tables that join to existing SQL tables and
execute SQL directly - web extensions are simply never going to offer
that capability (and you simply can't make a reliable bookmark sync
engine without that capability.)
The differences between Sync 1.1 and 1.5 are almost all related to
authentication, and it *is* possible to self-host all parts of the new
stack. I'd recommend you encourage the Nextcloud devs to talk with us
directly about how they might move their 1.1 implementation to 1.5.
Hope this helps,
Mark
(I know this might be changing, as more people implement sync
clients, but I don’t think many will do so.) However, I’m happy they
have adopted the WebExtension quasi-standard, as I expect this to be
much more stable – even more so, since a lot of extensions depend on it
rather than just a few people running their own sync infrastructure.
That being said, the landscape for WebExtension support in Firefox still
leaves some things to be desired, from my perspective as the developer
of floccus: It’s currently impossible to access bookmarks’ tags with a
webextension, and Firefox for Android doesn’t offer access to bookmarks
at all, which is a major drawback for me. Still, I feel things are
improving and we’re getting closer :slight_smile:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Browser_support_for_JavaScript_APIs
On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 7:23 PM Mark Hammond <mhamm...@mozilla.com
<mailto:mhamm...@mozilla.com>> wrote:
On 2/03/2018 1:26 pm, James Sundquist wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I’m interested in improving Mozilla Firefox support for open source,
> self-hosted solutions that do not require Firefox Sync servers for
> bookmarks, tags, history, and passwords. Here is my question on the
> status of Firefox support for self hosting + how the current 1.5 Sync
> implementation could be improved for the greater community. I’m
excited
> to hear your thoughts!
>
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1207473
That thread has a link to our docs for self-hosting a sync server, which
seems to be what you are asking for.
You also say in that thread that "I know the self-hosted community is
not satisfied with the current implementation of Sync 1.5 Afaik.", but
that's not our experience - we can certainly do a better job on
documentation, but we really need feedback on the areas that need help
and try to be responsive when we notice things that can be improved. We
also try to act on bug reports and pull requests in a timely manner.
In that vein, we are happy discuss how things could be improved for the
greater community - what did you have in mind?
Cheers,
Mark
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