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How do I sync search engine to Firefox for iOS from Firefox for desktop?

Mathias Hellquist
Mathias Hellquist
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One of my great discoveries when I installed Firefox for iOS on my iPhone was that the account sync with my Firefox account worked really well. It even imported my custom search engine (YubNub) to my phone, a thing I hadn’t been able to use previously. I immeadiately installed Firefox on my iPad too. Everything synced up...except for the (custom) search engine. Is there a setting for syncing search engines that I have missed? I have looked ”everywhere” without finding something of value to tweak, and it still works perfectly fine on my iPhone, just not on my iPad.

One of my great discoveries when I installed Firefox for iOS on my iPhone was that the account sync with my Firefox account worked really well. It even imported my custom search engine (YubNub) to my phone, a thing I hadn’t been able to use previously. I immeadiately installed Firefox on my iPad too. Everything synced up...except for the (custom) search engine. Is there a setting for syncing search engines that I have missed? I have looked ”everywhere” without finding something of value to tweak, and it still works perfectly fine on my iPhone, just not on my iPad.

All Replies (2)

Null User Value
Null User Value
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Hey Mathias,

I tried reproducing the YubNub search engine sync from MacOS to iOS (on an iPhone X) and couldn't get it to sync. Looking through Bugzilla, this has been a known bug for over 10 years. According to the comments from the Devs, this looks to be marked as the lowest priority and no current ETR for the issue.

If you want a lot of background read this Bugzilla discussion.

Given the discussion, I'm not sure how you got the setting to sync on your iPhone because the sync function doesn't read the files that would allow the sync. Were you already using YubNub on Safari or another browser on your iPhone?

Mathias Hellquist
Mathias Hellquist Umnikazi wombuzo
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Hi!

Yeah, I might have confused the working YubNub in my iPhone(X) with it syncing from my desktop. I set up YubNub on all my browsers on all my devices, and on my phone it "just worked" in Firefox without doing anything, but true enough, that could also mean I somehow had pressed "import" from another browser or something I guess.

On the topic of YubNub I have noticed it also disappears on my desktops now and then (most likely after Firefox updates), and I have to go an re-install it as a search engine, at all, via YubNub.org.

Anyways, thanks for confirming this indeed is a thing. It isn't overly cumbersome to fix at my end anyways, but I still have to work out if/how I can get it working on my iPad now, especially as it works perfectly on my iPhone. :)