Quicksaver
Sync capabilities
Hello,
I really love this add-on, I use it at work and plan to use it at home as well. I wonder if a Sync capability is possible ? (ie. Sharing tab groups across devices thanks to a Firefox account).
I found out that https://docs.services.mozilla.com/storage/apis-1.5.html Look promising ^^.
Sounds very interesting. Since I don't really use Sync let me ask you (as you probably will have an answer for this or can find out much faster), if you try to sync your tabs between devices with the add-on enabled, what is sync'd? All the tabs? Only visible tabs (in the current group)? Nothing? (I'm assuming the groups themselves aren't being sync'd.)
Thanks for your response ^^. With Sync I get all the tabs in all groups like there is no groups. These Sync'd tabs are shown in the 'History' menu. I can't restore all of them with one click and of course I loose the groups ability... The idea I think of is to be able to restore the groups accross devices. I didn't have yet the time to realy dig into the source code of your module to determine if we can use Sync API to achieve that.
I would also like to share the session, aka: You have the same Tab-Groups on all devices synced. IMHO this is better than the about:sync-tabs without groups by Firefox, especially it is a bit more "seamless". What do you think?
I also opt for this functionality - this is what I feel missing in original Panorama - possibility of synchronize groups between computers. It would be nice to have options to synchronize through the cloud (maybe google drive or dropbox)
I imagine that a click on Tab Groups shows me the same groups for all devices and different devices can have different or even the same group open - no difficult-to-reach and annoying "tabs from other devices" menus or similar.
@Quicksaver Can you please give me a time estimate for this feature? I.e. how many hours do you expect this to take?
Ref: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23318396/firefox-sdk-simple-storage-and-firefox-sync
To prevent collisions when using this from multiple devices, I suggest using/building a DB where each group and the relation of each tab to a group is maintained as a separate setting.
@Quicksaver In my previous post I was referring to your hourly rate mentioned on http://fasezero.com/addons/
@Quicksaver In my previous post I was referring to your hourly rate mentioned on http://fasezero.com/addons/
I'm sorry I must have missed that, did you edit that after writing the comment? I do remember reading your post before in my e-mail notifications but not your question; I don't receive notifications for edits. But maybe I just missed it.
To be honest, I wouldn't know how long it would take. I have never worked with sync'ing things other than preferences before and I haven't looked into it yet. Just by considering that Firefox already sync's tabs, it would probably be a matter of appending the groups information to those sync'ed tabs. So in theory it's simple, but things have a tendency to complicate in the end. ;)
Right now there are a few other things that, to be honest, take precedence as they are more important. For instance right now I'm optimizing the dragging and resizing groups and tabs parts of the code (which are a complete mess!), only because keeping these parts as they are would make it impossible to do half of the things that have been suggested so far. It's something I thought would take me a week at the most, I started doing that three weeks ago and I'm not even halfway done... I hope you understand why I can't really give you a very straightforward ETA like this.
I wanted to include this for the very next version, but apparently implementing it may be somewhat complex. So sync features won't make it on the very next version, although I still plan to work on it later in the future. This is definitely at the top of the list for new features.
In case you haven't thought of this already: Ideally each "instance" of the browser should be able to be open in different tab groups (at startup), so you could have a separate "Desktop" and "Laptop" groups and move tabs in between them. That is, when the groups sync, the browsers don't end up with the same group open at startup. (I like to keep separate sets of tabs open depending on the device, but would like to easily see what another device has open)
Edit: It could be like Send Tab to Device on steroids :)
That makes sense. It should sync the tabs but not "which" tab/group is active. That shouldn't be a problem, once I get to this of course.
Do you have the approach you were taking which became complex? Regarding which group out of the shared groups should be active on the device - this can easily be a choice b/w last open group+tab on current device vs last open group+tab overall.
Unfortunately no, I have to postpone working on major features like this for a while, until I can be sure about how WebExtensions will work (or not).
For what it's worth, I believe the browser potion of the Web Extensions sync API is in FF 52, and the kinto/server portion required to do syncing with firefox accounts is expected to land by the time Firefox 52 launches (next spring). See https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/11/18/webextensions-in-firefox-52/
I think this means that the API required here has been solidified, but I have not started using it in my extensions yet.
