Don't use LastPass and Sync together.

"don't use together", rather what I thought, and is the reason for my making this post. I At this moment, I've been using Last Pass for several years, and it has recently entered "paranoid-mode" over password security. Heck, I can't argue about that, but the process for switching over to generated passwords seems to be one heck of a lot of time and trouble. While I can grasp the security issue, I don't know of any problems with my "as-is" passwords, but do observe that some websites are entering this fray, so the nuisance grows. At this same time, I have decided to return to using Xmarks as well. I'd not been using that for a couple of years now, so things are in a mess with Xmarks as well. It's obvious that I am not alone with this dilemma, but what we're seeing is that Micro$oft, Google and Mozilla are far from being together in providing clean solutions to Built-In security problems for which they must share the responsibility. All this is taking most of the fun out of using our www! So I will try to disable Firefox Sync, at least as far as passwords. Having just ditched Windoze again (v10 now ) I have returned to Linux Mint, and face ditto problems with 3 other computers plus those ahead in my little rehab biz. Meanwhile Firefox is not making that easy.

Sure LastPass is "paranoid" right now, they just got caught up in their 2nd major "hack" or security failure of within the past last year, or so.

... what we're seeing is that Micro$oft, Google and Mozilla are far from being together in providing clean solutions ...

Mozilla software is open source, anyone can use the code without licensing fees and there are few rules to follow or few limitations. Microsoft on the other hand uses proprietary software and I don't believe Google is 100% open source; with few exceptions Mozilla avoids using proprietary code in Firefox.

I used "Sync" when it was an add-on called Weave from 2009 into March 2011 when it was built into Firefox 4.0. Worked fine for me, but with the changes made for Firefox 4.0 backwards compatibility with Weave was broken; leaving many users "out in the cold" with devices that couldn't run Firefox 4.0 or who didn't want to switch immediately. The older Firefox 3.6 was maintained with security updates for another 13 months after 4.0 came out, but Weave 1.0 / Sync 1.1 weren't compatible; the server cluster was updated rather than being replaced so Weave 1.0 was just killed off with little advance notice. Mozilla did better with the change to Sync 1.5 in April 2014 (Firefox 28 to 29) - a new server cluster was created and the older Sync 1.1 service was maintained for almost another year and a half for Firefox 28.o users who didn't update to Firefox 29+ versions.. I have kept up with Sync over the past few years, but since I don't have a 2nd device to "sync", I have run it between multiple Profiles on the same PC to see the changes that have come to Sync. And I quit doing that in May 2015 when I built a new PC for myself and really needed Sync; the "new" (at that time) Add-on Sync feature didn't work as I expected based upon what I had read. It doesn't really "synchronize" a user's add-ons, it installs they afresh from the Add-ons server; not a real big deal, but few of the "userset" preferences got transferred over which IMO left the user SOL. Easier to just grab a flash-stick and copy the existing Profile over to the new PC, than spend many hours figuring out "what was missing" and need the be configured by hand.

Nuff said about Sync. If LastPass works for you and the Sync passwords feature is turned off, fine - but keep in mind that your passwords won't be in Firefox - you'll be dependent upon LastPass and their extension for Firefox.

Thank you for all that effort, ed. Bottom line is that this complex problem has no real good answer, but who's surprised? See ya on the flip side!