New Sync Protocol in Firefox

If you are a Firefox users and you happen to use their Sync feature which was introduced back in Firefox 4, you might be pretty upset when the design is so confusing and hard to use since you have to have access to the other browser in order to set up a sync account.

Well, great news for you since Mozilla has changed their Sync protocol mechanism in the latest version which was released last April (Firefox 29). The new system only requires you to sign up using the new Firefox account and it's password-based system (two-factor authentication is now being developed, with a possibility of using Google Authenticator App and SMS).

Here are the easy step to migrate to the new sync protocol:

• upgrade everything to FF29
• disconnect old browsers from Sync
• create a Firefox Account
• sign all browsers into your new account with the same email and password

That's it. You are now synced using the new Firefox account and all your data remains safe during migration.

For those who are still using the old sync, please note that they will end the old protocol at the end of ESR release maintenance period (14-Oct-2014), so what are you waiting for? Upgrade now :)

Here's some warnings:

pairing-based Old Sync and password-based FxA-powered New Sync don’t mix: if you used pairing to connect two FF28 browsers together, you won’t be able to connect a third FF29 browser to them, even if you upgrade them all to FF29.

Firefox Sync

When i used Google Chrome for the first time, i spotted a nice feature called Sync which enables us to synchronize our preferences on one computer to be stored at our Google's account and we can transfer it to another computer (for example our laptop or workstation at the office) without having to export anything like in the past. We only need Internet access to Google and open up your Google Chrome and pick Synced option. Logged in to Google's account and your preferences are synced. Piece a cake huh?

I tried to find this feature in Firefox, but i was disappointed when i used a third party extensions (i forgot the name of the extension since it was quite a long time ago), but today, i'm installing Firefox Sync (previously named as Weave) to give it a try again. It's a useful tool which enables us to save our history, passwords, bookmarks and even open tabs across all your devices. What i like about this tool is that it gives us more options about what should we sync. For me, i only need to sync the bookmarks entries so that i will have a same bookmark entries in all of my computers.