1160526 - Sync not syncing tabs in reader view

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Android Sync, defect, P3)

Description

[LStudent]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:37.0) Gecko/37.0 Firefox/37.0
Build ID: 20150413180005

Steps to reproduce:

Go to a website you can see in reader view. Enter reader view. Sync. 


Actual results:

Page/tab not showing up on other devices. Leave reader view and sync again. Page gets synced.


Expected results:

Tab in reader view should get synced (and not only after you added it to tge reading list and sync the list but the actual tab)

Comment 1

[LStudent]

I just used firefox on android to submit this issue. On my laptop (Windows 7 64 bit)i use Firefox Dev Edition.

I made this reddit post too that discribes the whole thing in a bit more detail. I am not even sure it is a bug (I consider it to be one at least): http://redd.it/34ihoc

Comment 2

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

I think this is intentional, although we could revisit the product decision:

https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/mobile/android/services/src/main/java/org/mozilla/gecko/sync/repositories/android/RepoUtils.java#166

ckarlof, can you nominate if you want to do so?

Comment 3

[Chris Karlof [:ckarlof]]

Not syncing "about" tabs makes sense to me. It's not clear that it was understood that reader view tabs wouldn't be a synced as a consequence.  

I was just making sure it was in the right component. :)

Sebastian, can you please triage this?

Comment 4

[Sebastian Kaspari (:sebastian; :pocmo)]

Oh, nice edge case.

Interestingly we handle this gracefully when sending a single reader view tab: We just send the actual URL to the other device. That's what we should do here as well, I guess. Desktop and Android use the same URL structure for reader view, so in theory we /could/ synchronize the reader view URL and we'd open reader view on the other device. But this might not work with iOS or any other future apps on top of sync, so let's not do that for now.

I'll add it to the AS backlog. It sounds like something we could pick up along the way.

Comment 6

[Stefan Deiac]

Hi, I tried to reproduce this issue on the latest version of Nightly 68.0a1 (2019-03-27) and Release 66.0.2. I can see the links after I make sync but the problem is that the links are saved as a normal link and not as a reader view.

Devices:

• Nexus 6 (Android 6.0.1);
• Nokia 6 (Android 7.1.1);
• Motorola Nexus 6 (Android 7.1.1);
• One Plus 5T (Android 9).

Comment 7

[Lina Butler [:lina]]

Per comment 4, I think that's intentional, since reader mode URLs aren't portable between devices. It's something we'll want to keep in mind for new Sync work, but I don't think we'll be fixing Fennec's implementation.