Fórum de Apoio de Firefox

There are 2 processes involved in Firefox Sync, and 0 differentiation between them in the language used to describe what Firefox Sync does in any of the documentation, this makes nearly every discussion on the topic highly confusing to borderline misleading.

When you press Sync, you are pushing settings to Firefox servers. When you sign in to Sync, you are pulling settings from Firefox servers.

Both of these steps are referred to interchangeably as "syncing" and there is next to no documentation of what causes each to occur nor what they actually do.

Why is this dangerous you might ask? Well, let's say I buy a new computer, I want to set it up the same way I use all my devices, so I sign in to sync to synchronize my settings, makes perfect sense. Nothing tells me anything is happening when I sign in, so I click the sync button because I want to synchronize my settings with my other devices. Big mistake. I've just overwritten the server-side sync profile with a default Firefox profile. You know how you fix that? You sign in and press the sync button to overwrite the sync profile again. But you know what happens when you sign in? You become synced with the now blank sync profile and lose all the settings that you want to be pushing to the sync profile. This just happened to me. Thankfully I was only choosing to sync add-ons and options AT THE TIME and I have backups that are about 6 months old and I rarely change settings, but some things like my homepage URLs are something that I do change fairly often, and I'm sure some additional sites were whitelisted since by default I just reject all cookies. I also thankfully use policies.json to block updates so I didn't immediately get assaulted by that too.

SO! I HIGHLY suggest that when merely signing in to Sync, the default should be for syncing to be off to start off with, so that you can choose what to "sync" BEFORE it occurs. However, because of the language, the question arises, what am I choosing to sync for? Am I choosing what to PULL from servers? Or am I choosing what gets PUSHED to the servers? When syncing is turned on, does that mean I an pulling the settings that I have chosen? Or am I am pulling ALL settings while only pushing what I have chosen IF I click the Sync button? Or do I push EVERYTHING?

It's incredibly unclear how the Sync feature works and both of the "main" articles on it are completely useless for understanding it because the term "sync" is used interchangeably for pushing or pulling settings.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-choose-what-information-sync-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sync-custom-preferences

What are the correct steps to rectify this horrid situation? Sign-in, set-up sync, choose "Options" and "Add-Ons" again, THEN copy over the backup settings, THEN Sync them to the "cloud"? If I have 2 different devices setup with sync, and 1 chooses to sync options and the other chooses to sync bookmarks, then I click sync on BOTH devices repeatedly, what occurs?

I have to computer with totally different tabs. Will Firefox sync combine the two sets of tabs? I realize that I may have duplicates and a LOT of tabs. I just don't want to lose any tabs or bookmarks when the computers sync afterward. I am currently assuming that the tabs sets will be merged and that I will have to remove duplicates.

Hi, I realized my Firefox browser had installed itself twice upon installation. So I uninstalled it, reinstalled it, and then logged back into my Firefox account. I tried to sync everything up, but for some reason it's acting like my bookmarks and history no longer exits. Did I overwrite all of my bookmarks? Or did I just not sync it properly? Please help!

I was using Ubuntu before. I was using firefox and i had lots of recorded logins in that browser. I sign in with my current account and i opened sync including the password and login. Recently i changed my distro, i am using Fedora right now. I log in my firefox account, yet my passwords and logins didn't came back.

For some reason my Firefox on my Mac and Windows computer won't sync even though I am using the same account. I would like my Mac to look the same as my Windows computer. I have tried logging in and logging out on both, all the basic fixes but nothing has helped.

Thanks.

- Alyssa

I got a new device and had to sign in and sync everything. When firefox asked about syncing I didn't realize it was asking about using the edge bookmarks to sync with. I tried to cancel but it was too late. Can I undo/remove firefox syncing to edge? Does this mean any changes in Edge will automatically change firefox now? I do not want edge bookmarks/settings. I want to get my old firefox settings back. If it matters: Windows 10 home on one device, Windows 11 on another. All browsers up-to-date.

I have an account that has configured as the primary email an address I'm no longer able to use, since it was from a previous company. The same account also has a secondary email address that was already added to the account. Even if the secondary address was added before, when trying to make the secondary address the primary, it still sends the validation code to the first address. The same happens if I try to complete delete the account. I do have the user/password of the account and also the recovery key.

Is it possible to have the second email marked as primary or the account deleted somehow? Thanks!

Hello everyone,i lost my saved datas like history,saved password etc when i changed my gmail password which i used to syc my firefox account.I wonder why it happened because i did not tick the box asking if i want to delete them.I also used another laptop to check and the data i lost in my other laptop were there.I added secondary email as back up and clicked to change the new email to primary only for me to see my data got lost from the second laptop again.why? i tried to change the password of my first primary email back to the old password but google did not allow me.My question is,can changing back to my password back to the old one bring my lost data back? i asked because that was the password used by firefox to save my data in their server.will google ever allow me to change back to old password after sometime? what i am amazed at is that i login using other browswer with the new pasword on another laptop and i got back my syc datas.Thanks in advance for your feed back.

I am using "multiple account containers" and when I remove a site from "manage site list" after a while, after synchronization, the site will again appear in the site list and when opening that site will still offer me to open in this container.

How can I permanently remove a site from "site list"?

Hey all, (thanks for the continued work on firefox and happy new year) I use Firefox sync from multiple devices in my ecosystem, a micture of all three main OS (Windows, Linux and macOS / IOS). Some time ago, I must have had one device which probably generated a new device UID everytime it synced, or some kind of bug in the Firefox IOS client. This results in having a large magnitude of devices in my firefox sync account. I can only delete them one-by-one with a confirmation dialogue and a reload of the page, which is really cumbersome. I have the feature request of some easier device management policy here. Ideas would be either a "delete all" button and afterwards signing in again on all still active devices, or a series of check boxes to perform actions like a delete on multiple devices at once, perhaps even with a "select all" shortcut at the top. Feasible? Cheers, Niels

HI, Yesterday (Sunday) i backup everything using the sync option. Restarted my computer with a fresh install of windows. Mow when i can to sync again, all of my bookmarks and add-ons etc have gone? Why? Please Help!!!!! Regards Dave

I am having trouble sending tabs from my phone to my PC. My device is connected to my computer, and I can send tabs from my PC to my phone successfully, but not the other way around. I have no idea what could even be the issue, and I have only seen people asking about sending tabs from PC to Mobile, not the other way around. Is there something I am missing? None of the Firefox troubleshoot pages have helped.

hi,

i recently changed my firefox sync password and primary email. no problems here. everything went smoothly. then went away on a little holiday. when i got back, the browser didn't accept my password. thinking 6 days of sun and heat must've melted down my memory cells, i reset it. unproblematic process. received email notifications about the update. but the same thing happened again. i very slowly and carefully typed the password several times, copy&pasted it, just in case, then reset it once more, just in case. then restarted firefox. then deleted and downloaded it again. still doesn't work.

i can log into mozilla acounts with the new password, so the issue with the browser.

please help! i have years of stuff saved on that account - it would be really tragic to lose it.

thank you already.

(also, i don't have 2FA set-up)