Sync doesn't sync anything on fresh install & login of browser extension in brave

🐞Bug Reports
#1

To get your bug fixed faster please try to answer the following questions:

  1. Which browser, operating system and versions of those are you using?
    MacOS Ventura
    Brave: Version 1.65.114 Chromium: 124.0.6367.60 (Official Build) (x86_64) (latest)

  2. Which version of Memex are you running?
    Latest (3.18.26)

  3. What are the steps you took that lead to the bug?
    I’m gonna preface this by saying I’ve got multiple bugs and maybe they are all related or maybe my sync data got screwed up. I’ve also had Memex installed since 2020 on Firefox, then Brave Browser, and then my android phone. I’ve rarely used Memex aside from importing my browser bookmarks multiple times over the years.

steps to reproduce:
In Brave:

  1. Uninstall Memex extension
  2. Reinstall Memex extension from chrome web store
  3. Login via the fullscreen login/onboarding window. *This happened the first time, the second time I tried this it did auto login by redirecting to the memex.social/auth website.
  4. Wait for sync to happen (only takes a second)
  5. Top corner says: Everything is synced, Last sync: 2 minutes ago, pending uploads 0
  6. No saved pages or spaces are present in the UI, Reloading extension dashboard page doesn’t help.

What I tried after this:

  1. Go to Memex extension settings. Log out.
  2. Log in.
  3. This time it sync’d only two spaces (life & tips) both with a Memex getting started page saved and nothing else.

What I tried after this:
4. (In Brave) Delete site data for memex.social domain.
5. Logout, then login from extension settings.
6. Login works and syncs my spaces & bookmarks, however not all of them (only the ones that were shown in firefox last, but not ones imported from brave before I reinstalled the extension)

My guess is that by having Memex extension/app installed in brave and firefox and my android, I have unknowingly created multiple sync data structures or something and when I reinstall the extension it is not consistent which sync it will pull from or if it will pull any of my bookmarks/notes.

I’m not worried about loosing my Memex account data since I have backed it up & also have every saved page in my browser bookmark manager.

#2

Thanks for reporting we just discovered a bug with Brave in particular that makes sync not work - and will introduce better UX around it.
So recently we had to (unwillingly) do the switch to the new Manifest V3 which completely changed how the sync works. For details: It works by background messages instead of listening to storage changes.

Brave seems to block any messages coming specifically from google servers (we use firebase), causing the sync messages to not arrive.
To fix this:

  1. Go to brave://settings/privacy
  2. Enable Use Google services for push messaging
  3. Restart browser
  4. Create a new sync entry on one of the other devices
  5. Should now sync up everything although dependent on how many items you have it may take a bit.

Sorry for the inconvenience :frowning:

1 Like
#3

Did that workaround fix it for you?

One UX fix is already done (a button to force sync) and an automated download sync every hour as a fallback is up as a second next task, including some updates to the sync modal itself which became less reliable generally after the MV3 updates.