Hello everyone,
2024 is here! I hope you all made it nicely into the new year! What's been going on in the world of bookmark syncing?
I've been working on migrating the floccus browser extension code to Manifest version 3, which was introduced by Google a few years ago and will become mandatory this summer. Sadly, Firefox has proven to not reliably implement Manifest version 3 yet, at least when floccus is concerned. Firefox users had to experience this the past weeks as I published floccus version 5 which intorduced Manifest v3 support and later had to roll back to Manifest v2, at least for Firefox, because I couldn't get floccus to work reliably on Manifest v3. I'm sorry about this inconvenience for my esteemed Firefox users, and must caution you: please do not switch browsers just because of this. I'm convinced that we need Firefox and Mozilla in this world.
Anyway, apart from the above troubles, Floccus v5 is now being rolled out. I have my fingers crossed that this will go smoothly, but still have too much experience to not go for a staged roll out, so, it might take a few days until v5 reaches your devices.
What's new in v5?
First and formost, Accounts are now called Profiles. The wording never made too much sense, in my opinion, but now that's rectified
The overview view changed a little to make some thing more accessible and others less, I hope, the new version is more intuitive for everyone
Also, there's now a 'Sync all' button
There's also a new state floccus can be in: "Scheduled sync" -- this happens when a different floccus client is currently syncing and wee have to wait for our turn. Previously this wait was implicit in the sync process, now it's explicit to avoid confusion and frustration over inexplicably long sync times
Floccus now syncs immediatly 3s after browser start, instead of 1 minute, to prevent you having to wait for it
The floccus android and iOS app no longer syncs in the background. I removed this, because it was buggy, drained batteries and data for people and not even reliable
Another removed feature is the unlock passphrase: It wasn't well thought through in my opinion, and additionally it wasn't possible with Manifest v3. In my opinion, if you are worried about an attacker having access to your computer gaining access to your floccus credentials because they are not encrypted, the attacker will have lots of other ways to get your credentials because they have access to your computer.
v5 has also seen lots of smaller fixes, like fixing the HTML format for syncing bookmarks to be compatible with what browsers expect. I also improved the wording in the user interface in many places to make floccus more intuitive to use for new users
The iOS is now available as pay-only in order to balance out the developer fees I have to pay to Apple annually. I hope this is acceptable :)
Nextcloud Bookmarks has also seen some love the last couple of months:
It now allows javascript links, also known as bookmarklets. Floccus will soon catch up and also allow syncing javascript links via the bookmarks app
You can now edit the name of folders that have been shared with you by others
The app is now compatible with Nextcloud 26, 27 and 28
Importing bookmarks now tries to guess in a smart way whether your bookmarks' creation dates are stored in Miliseconds or seconds (you may call this AI if you like :P )
I also fixed the app's service worker, so loading times in the app should be faster again
And I fixed that annoying bug that opening a public link would log you out of your Nextcloud
I've also got some time left to look into the remaining open issues on Github and even have some preformance improvements up my sleeve (~200% speed increase when syncing with floccus, anyone?)
I'm very grateful for the support I've received in working on these projects. Thank you to everyone who supported me in these efforts! Also, feel free to shoot me a message, if you have feedback, ideas, critique or just want to say hi.
All the best and godspeed to you, wherever you may be right now :)