1598572 - start sync engine on startup of the browser

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Sync, defect)

Description

[Lazy Monkey]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.3904.108 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I launched firefox, then opened about:sync-log waited for a sync to happen (occasionally hitting f5 to refresh the page).
I was not browsing the web, so firefox was essentially doing nothing.

Actual results:

firefox started the sync engine (bookmarks, etc) after ten minutes.

Expected results:

sync engine should be more aggressive: it should start as soon as possible after the browser window is opened (especially if it is not detected network traffic in the browser).
the user should not have to manually start the sync engine.
instead on chrome the sync engine is much better: chrome sync works flawlessy, and I never have to think about the bookmark sync, it just works automatically.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Bugbug thinks this bug should belong to this component, but please revert this change in case of error.

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

We sync every 10 minutes. On startup, if the previous sync was longer than 10 minutes ago then we generally sync within 10 seconds of the browser starting - but if the previous sync was less then 10 minutes ago, we wait until that time is up.

There's no good reason to sync as soon as the browser starts if we wouldn't have synced if the browser was kept running.

Unless I'm missing something, that's working as intended.

Comment 3

[Lazy Monkey]

There is a good reason: if I just added new bookmarks on another device (ie mobile) I want to see them on another device, just after I started the browser, and I expect to see them without intervention by me (ie starting sync manually). It should just work automatically.
Sorry but regarding the sync engine I have to say that chrome is really much better than firefox, it always does the "right" thing.
You (rightly) keep enhancing the rendering of the pages, but you seems to forget the little things, and people is noticing it. From your response it seems that you just don't care about this use case, or you just don't understand it. Please just copy what Chrome is doing.
Also about syncing manually: your new menu design made it harder to start manually the sync: on older firefox I had a sync icon in the toolbar, and I just had to click once to start sync, or just hover on the button to see the time of last sync in a tooltip. Also it was easy to see if firefox was syncing, since the icon was spinning. Now you removed the sync icon (why?!?), and now I have to click more times to get the same result, and I cannot easily monitor the sync status, because the icon is now in a menu. You are making the user interface less useful, by taking away features (you removed the tooltip with last sync time, without any good reason! I had to file a bug report, and now you readded the tooltip in v71. what were thinking your ui designers when they removed the feature? Please hire new designers!).
You are also removing features in other areas (like the new about:config), please stop removing features, just read the firefox subreddit to see what your users are thinking about it.
Sorry for the rant, but sometimes it is necessary.
Thanks.

Comment 4

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Tortino from comment #3)

There is a good reason: if I just added new bookmarks on another device (ie mobile) I want to see them on another device, just after I started the browser, and I expect to see them without intervention by me (ie starting sync manually).

To be clear, a scenario you often see is:

• Exit Desktop Firefox.
• On some other device add a new bookmark.
• Within 10 minutes of exiting the Desktop Firefox, you restart it, and are frustrated to see the bookmark you just added not appear.

Is that correct? And that this happens often enough and is frustrating enough we should change it for every user, even if the work done by sync causes slow and old hardware to make Firefox startup a little slower for some users?

From your response it seems that you just don't care about this use case, or you just don't understand it.

I don't understand the "within 10 minutes" part of it, no. (And it's actually going to be more like 5 minutes on average - 10 minutes is a worst-case, assuming you shut the browser down immediately after the last sync completed)

Sorry for the rant, but sometimes it is necessary.

But sometimes not helpful. You should read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html and ensure your comments here are in line with what's outlined there.

Comment 5

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The priority flag is not set for this bug.
:markh, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 6

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Sorry for the delay, but things are working as we expect and intend here.