Had a thought, but some quick searching didn’t really give me much.
Is there such a thing as a browser that respects privacy, and can be synched through self hosted means?
I’d be looking for tab sync, bookmark, history, etc.
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The only full sync option is trying to self-host the sync server for Firefox or Brave. But both seem to be a pita.
There are easy options like floccus but that only syncs bookmarks.
Brave
Brave sync server is open source and self host able.
Everything a browser syncs is syncable passwords, history, bookmarks, cards etc
The “issue” is there is not a user interface element to easily add the self hosted instance url
There are workarounds though
You can read my quick how to here
I forgot about librewolf. Any downsides to it over Firefox?
- Some sites won’t work at all due to the anti-fingerprinting stuff that’s enabled on it.
- Everything will be forced to light mode too because of it. Sometimes websites will render at the wrong size.
- DRM content won’t play.
I’m using Zen currently, because it at least strips out the telemetry that Firefox has while still being a normal browser.
It’s aggressively privacy-first in some ways. It doesn’t do any self-updating which could be considered phoning home, so you have to make sure you have a way to keep it updated, through a package manager or otherwise. There’s a separate update monitor if you want that, for Windows at least. I tend to dial back the anti-fingerprinting a bit because it just makes browsing frustrating to me. I understand the risk of fingerprinting, and it’s good that they do everything they can to avoid being fingerprinted, but it doesn’t strike the right balance for me. Particularly forcing light mode, I absolutely fucking loathe getting light blasted unexpected into my eyeballs, I always have. The biggest mistake technology ever made in my opinion was trying to pretend an actively illuminated screen was paper and make it blinding white.
I’ve so far resisted the urge to enable DRM. If something won’t show me stuff without DRM I’m willing to just say I don’t want to watch it.
And obviously as per the topic, I turn on sync, which is not on by default, but that’s easy and a sensible default. Honestly it’s mostly sensible defaults.
Did you check out https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver?
EDIT: My bad, project is moved to https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
Syncserver was what OP was asking for, I used it and it was great while it worked. The rust rewrite is almost impossible to self-host, at least as of a year ago there was no easy way to do it on a reasonably sized machine.
there was no easy way to do it on a reasonably sized machine.
Why? What is the issue?
If I recall correctly they used some exotic database that is made for multi tenant cloud environments and scales up really well, but does not scale down too much. I’ve seen some article where a guy managed to set it up locally but it was a long one, and the result was resource hungry. But, again, my knowledge may be outdated
Just look at the setup docs. First they tell you to setup mysql and then this nugget
The correct way to authenticate with Spanner is by generating an OAuth token and pointing your local application server to the token. In order for this to work, your Google Cloud account must have the correct permissions; contact the Ops team to ensure the correct permissions are added to your account.
Looks like there is a simple way now, yay! https://blog.diego.dev/posts/firefox-sync-server/
ive been using floccus for a few years now and no complaints
i havnt tried syncing tabs but i think its an option. what i do have is a one-way sync job for the tabs in each browser so i at least have a backup of them, and each browser has its own file, but i would imagine if you tried to sync the same file between multiple devices it would just get very messy at some point
I use the floccus extension with Nextcloud as a backend for bookmarks/tabs and wallabag for read-it-later
Does it sync browsing history?
It can track a bookmark last visited time and count a bookmark number times xlicjed. It is a bookmark sync centric service
Yeah I wish there was a good answer to that. Floccus at least works ok for bookmarks.
Librewolf (privacy focused firefox fork) syncing the user folders with Syncthing maybe?
You could use KaraKeep (formerly Hoarder) with the Hoarder’s Pipette extension maybe?
I use xBrowserSync for bookmark syncing. The code hasnt been touched in a few years but it still works great. Set it and forget it. There’s also an android app - not sure about ios.
But it doesnt do browser tabs - just bookmarks.
I use #xBrowserSync too! I self host the server. It has extensions for Firefox & Chromium. Android app, as you said. But no iOS app. I was trying to make a browser based JavaScript app to use on iOS, but couldn’t finish it it.
The Arch Wiki used to have some elaborate tricks on Firefox profile syncing, and some software to support it, maybe you should check that out (but the actual software FF uses is or used to be FOSS as well).
Have a look at Vivaldi
According to their help page it’ll do what you want.
