Old Bookmarks Synced to Account
Categories
(Firefox :: Sync, defect, P3)
Tracking
()
People
(Reporter: jura.som, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0
Steps to reproduce:
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I used two devices, A (logged-in) and B (not logged-in).
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I spent two hours configuring and cleaning my bookmarks on device A.
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I logged-in on device B.
Actual results:
- All the old bookmarks stored locally on device B were now synced to the account, overwriting all bookmarks on machine A and completely erasing all the organizing work I did in point (2)
Expected results:
- The newer bookmarks should have been preserved.
This is catastrophic behavior almost enough to me to switch to a different browser now. OMG. Seriously?!
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Comment 2•5 years ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Sync' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Comment 3•5 years ago
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We're very sorry you experienced this :( The expected behaviour is that the bookmarks were merged. Unfortunately, if device B was previously connected to the account, then reconnecting can cause unexpected things to happen (and sadly, different users have different expectations, so even the "correct" thing is unexpected for some groups of people).
Your best bet is to perform the reorganization while both devices are connected - sync will not attempt to "reconcile" the newly connected device.
Hi Mark. Thanks a lot for your response. I realized that the old bookmarks were in fact merged-in, in addition to the new ones.
Perhaps it would be a good option to have some slightly more clever bookmarks, were Firefox remembers the timestamps of when bookmarks were added as well as the last sync etc, to resolve situations like this.
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Comment 5•5 years ago
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(In reply to jura.som from comment #4)
Perhaps it would be a good option to have some slightly more clever bookmarks, were Firefox remembers the timestamps of when bookmarks were added as well as the last sync etc, to resolve situations like this.
It does - which is how it knows to merge. To manage this correctly, it would need to know your intent with that second device - a different person taking the exact same steps might have a different intent (ie, for that other person, what Sync did would be exactly what was desired and the behaviour you desire would be a bug). For some time we did ask the user when re-connecting, but we found that just confused a significant number of users and still did the wrong thing for some.
If it new that I deleted a particular bookmark it could safely assume that I don't want it to be merged-in again.
It would have to remember deleted bookmarks to get this right, which could be a privacy issue. Maybe remembering a hash of the deleted bookmarks and then check when the new ones are being merged-in.
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Comment 7•10 months ago
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Because we aren't intending to change the merge strategy, let's close this 4yo bug.
Description
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