Improve New Android Device Migration

ohshazbot — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 19:42:02 GMT

Last night I set up a new phone and went through the process of migrating Firefox to it. And it was a poor experience. I use firefox sync but I assert that's an incomplete solution. There's a few layers of stories in here that could be explored, I'm just gonna leave it here and let other decide which aspects deserve attention:

After signing into firefox sync, history, bookmarks, etc migrated. Good start
- I do not use firefox for saved passwords, but having the settings that turned all that off get lost when I migrated was annoying
None of my extensions were installed on the new phone
- extensions are kept in sync on desktop so this was surprising to experience
None of my search engines were installed on my new phone
- There also doesn't seem to be an easy way to migrate them, I had to retype everything in by hand since the custom search engines setup is in settings so I cannot copy/paste from a web page with the values I need
There was no good way to migrate my tabs over
- Tabs from other devices only shows tabs which were in use recently, so not all of the 84 tabs I had to move were present
- Using the 3-dot -> share all tabs to share to new device didn't work
  - The notifications cut off at 50
    - This goes into another gripe I've had with firefox sharing to android, it depends on the notification for the tab to actually get opened in firefox, whereas if I share to desktop it doesn't rely on me to click something to ensure the share actually occurs
  - Additionally if you click the stacked notification, it opens one tab and clears out all the other shares
- Attempting to select everything and bookmark was also a poor experience
  - There's no select all option, so you need to click every single tab
  - Bookmarking just shoved them into the default bookmark folder, so now I had to deal with a subset of tabs in the bookmark folder I wanted to migrate
    - I couldn't find a way to migrate multiple bookmarks to a new folder to try to provide my tab migration bookmarks a clean slate
None of my tab collections migrated over
- These were smaller so using the share option to reconstruct on the other end was more viable, but still another manual step

Re: Improve New Android Device Migration

billyswong — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 03:38:15 GMT

If only we could copy & paste the Firefox profile similar to how we do in desktop/laptop computers, then all these will be solved easily.

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Improve New Android Device Migration

Re: Improve New Android Device Migration