Fenix: Investigate Sync collections

[vesta0]

This ticket is for UX + Sync team to investigate how we might we solve the following user problems:

Problem Statement:
FxA users can't access their Fenix collections on other FxA enabled devices, so they are not able to continue/complete their tasks across devices.

[yoasif]

There is interest in syncing Fenix collections to desktop: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/egd6zb/firefox_preview_for_android_has_collections_can/

There is prior art in Fennec of syncing open tabs (this is available in View > Sidebar > Synced Tabs on desktop) -- I think it makes sense to extend that metaphor to collections stored on Fenix (on desktop).

[jawz101]

This could be fixed with this

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/5853

Because collections are just yet more bookmarks, why do we keep reinventing wheels?

[pauljacobson]

It would be really helpful if Collections could be synced, as Collections.

[jawz101]

.. and we call them tab groups 0_o

[andreicristianpetcu]

Calling them tab groups would be really cool since a lot of people use tab groups one way or another. Heck, even Chrome is working on tab groups on desktop.

Just a rename from Collections to Tab Groups would bring a huge spike in popularity for this feature.

[yoasif]

Ran into this due to trying to migrate tabs from an old Fenix on an old device and finding that #11404 does not exist, nor does #2080. @liuche suggested that I send a collection over via send tab, but I ended up not receiving 90% of my tabs - and they appeared as notifications anyway, instead of a neat bundled collection.

This feature should happen in any case, but I wanted to provide another angle in which it could be useful (data portability).

[madb1lly]

Hi all,

Not being able to sync collections undermines their usefulness because I've got no way to back them up, therefore I'm much more likely to keep a massive tab stack instead because these tabs are synchronised.

Wouldn't a simple way to do this be to make Collections a special bookmark folder?

Cheers 🙂

[vesta0]

Thanks for the use case @madb1lly we will be working on this feature in Q3 :)

[NotWoods]

A-C issue: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components/issues/7640

[NotWoods]

After discussions with the sync team here is the approach we've agreed on.

Generic sync is nice to have but will have many implications, so that work will be deferred. For collections in particular, we can "abuse" the synced tabs store.

Fenix would report all tabs in a collection as being "open", but would also record a new attribute called 'collections' which would be an array of strings (to handle a tab existing in multiple collections). This system would resemble labels in GMail.

Advantages:

• Simple to add and doesn't require complicated discussions around offering a new data choice to sync users.
• Desktop gets some support for free! It would immediately list these tabs from Fenix, and it would be a fairly simple change in desktop to start recognizing this new attribute and create nested menus for tabs in collections, or otherwise use a custom UI for such tabs.
• It doesn't lock us in - if desktop ends up wanting the feature we can think about doing it in a slightly different way and making it a "first class" feature.

Downsides:

• "Merging" of collections is the responsibility of the android-specific code - there's no single, canonical definition of what a named collection is, but instead, each device gets to nominate what it has as the collection locally.

[madb1lly]

Hi @NotWoods,
Sounds good! ETA? 😃
Cheers 🙂