1401950 - Unclear status of supporting of storage.sync API

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Developer Documentation Graveyard :: Add-ons, defect, P3)

Description

[Danny Lin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:55.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/55.0
Build ID: 20170824053622

Steps to reproduce:

Call storage.sync on Firefox Android.


Actual results:

The API is available. Calling it doesn't get an error.


Expected results:

The MDN documentation says that storage.sync is not supported on Firefox for Android.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/storage/sync

When we say that an API is not supported we mean that calling the API gets an undefined value and throws an error. But I wonder what the documentation intended to say is that the stored data won't be synced across the web. The documentation in this way is quite misleading.

Additionally, the documentation doesn't tell us that since which version calling the API won't throw an error.

It also doesn't tell what would happen if we call storage.sync on a version that syncing across the web is not supported: Will data be stored locally or thrown away? If the data is stored locally does it differ with storage.local or storage.sync is actually an alias of storage.local? What will the value of the areaName argument of storage.onChange be? Etc...

The same applies to Firefox desktop. If what the documentation intended to say is just "syncing accross the web is supported since Firefox 53", it should be rephrased to be more clear.

Comment 1

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.