Synch new comments on various devices with Firefox

June 23, 2016 3:09 PM

I use Firefox on my Ubuntu laptop, and Android phone and tablet. I have FF sync set up, but it doesn't track new comments, so I read some of a thread on the laptop and then some at work on the tablet, and when I get home the new comments is out of sync. Is there any way to sync this up so I always get the same number of new comments for a thread?
posted by marienbad to MetaFilter-Related at 3:09 PM (6 comments total)

Unfortunately no - the way we're currently tracking it is fuzzy and - if I recall correctly - cookie-based, so it doesn't transfer across devices.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 3:10 PM on June 23, 2016

I understand why it can't be implemented *now*... but I'm with marienbad in that I'd love to see syncing between devices.
posted by one4themoment at 7:52 PM on June 23, 2016

It's something we can generally keep in mind. Right now the feature request list is basically closed, and will remain so for a while while frimble gets up to speed - we have several things that are going to take priority at that point, as well, so I don't want to sound unrealistically encouraging. I'm also not at all sure that it's technically possible within server-performance limitations - the "new" number that gets displayed on the front page is fuzzy in order to keep in lightweight, if I understand correctly.
posted by restless_nomad (staff) at 10:26 PM on June 23, 2016

Yeah, it was more that I wondered if there was some sort of greasemonkey script that could do this.
posted by marienbad at 8:20 AM on June 24, 2016

What r_n said, yeah. It's possible that at some point trying to revisit the idea of tracking user state server-side to that degree will be worth it—sizing it out years ago with the server resources we had didn't look great, basically—but for now we don't have any plans.

Syncing client-side with some sort of script seems in principle doable but I wouldn't know where to start with suggestions there, and the broader the set of devices the more complicated that's likely to be to manage.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:37 AM on June 24, 2016

Okay another issue is that in some threads it doesn't show new comments even when there are (for e.g. in the new Brexit thread it didn't show any new comments but there were actually four new ones.)
posted by marienbad at 4:13 PM on June 27, 2016