Add Collections to Firefox Sync
Firefox for Mobile needs to sync Collections too.
My wife typically trusts me to make the tech decisions in my household, and is fine with using and supporting Mozilla and Firefox. Overall, she likes the new Mobile Firefox too, as do I.
She's a typical Tab Hoarder kind of user. On her last phone, I introduced her to Collections. Much easier to use and get to than Bookmarks, easy to understand, good at helping her control the immense amount of tabs she otherwise has open. She basically fell in love with the feature.
A few days ago she got a new phone. We still have her old one, but the screen is 1/3 cracks and it no longer holds a charge well. "Well loved", for sure.
Install Firefox on new phone --> sync over her stuff --> all good... Well, wait... Where are her collections with her hundred-or-more tabs in them for various stuff?
Turns out they don't sync?
I've been helping her manually move over the tabs from the collections on her old phone to the new phone, but I feel *extremely* lucky we still have the phone. If she'd lost her phone instead, that would be quite the amount of time she'd spent getting acquainted with and using this feature just to find it doesn't save anywhere.
This was all essentially written as a real-life use-case, for the following plea:
Please, *please* add Collections to what is able to be synced with the Firefox Sync feature.
All Replies (8)
Hi
Tha k you for your question, I am glad you like and find useful the new Collections feature.
At present, Collections is just in Firefox for Android so with Firefox Sync mainly used to move data between desktop and mobile, there is no where for the data to go. That said, I am aware that more is planned for this feature so this could be something that changes in a future update.
Hi Seburo,
I'm not familiar with the codebase, but can't the collections be bootstrapped with the bookmarks syncing?
Besides, that means you might be able to access your mobile collections on desktop somewhere.
But either way I do believe these need to be synced, or have the option to be synced, as otherwise we'll have to just stop using them. Not much point to them if a lost phone (that is otherwise syncing everything) means hours or even days of lost/wasted effort.
I do hope this (or similar) arrives in future - holding out hope for that.
Hi
At present there is no where for Collections to go through the Firefox Sync process, but this is something that we may look to enlarge upon in a future update.
I will quit using Firefox if I have to move my collections manually again. Why give us a feature that is not supported? I'm really upset. I don't have enough time left in my life to repeat everything over and over.
This message is for the suport team.
I had a similar problem. I had to reset my phone, so I did a complete backup of my phone data in addiction to Firefox Sync, but however I lost all my Collections (that included more than a hundred tabs). If I knew this big defect I would have used Bookmarks.
If your collections don't follow you when you upgrade or move phone, they aren't really worth having. I've built up collections of 100 or so tabs...sob...as in tears.... For know can't we just build an export all collections -> Json, import to new browser?
As an interim, anything like Malcolm's latest response would do the trick. Some way, any way, to just quickly export to JSON (or another format?) so that we can at least do this between an old and a new phone in future.
That said, the long-term goal should still be to get this syncing as part of Firefox Sync. It really is close to useless compared to just using Bookmarks if the Collections can't be synced...
Thank you for your feedback, I hope that this can be incorporated into a future update to Firefox and the Firefox Sync platform.