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Improve New Android Device Migration

ohshazbot
Making moves

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
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