Making it easier to migrate data from other browsers into Firefox

jamesh · September 20, 2023, 8:10am

Hi Mike,

I’ve been looking over cases like this that have come up in the past to see how things were dealt with, and the closest was the boxwallet snap. In that case, the decision was made to allow the snap to provide personal-files interface plugs, but not auto-connect them. So this meant that a user could grant read access to those other apps’ configuration files by connecting the plug, but the grant happens outside of the snap’s control. So this is likely one option available to Firefox.

For the portals alternative, I think it would be reasonable to update xdg-desktop-portal and friends in older releases. We’ve done it before to support other cases, and it would be worth doing now too.

For the problem of picking a starting folder, it looks like support for this was added 2 months ago:

github.com

flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/e0e359c93f81c8aa817750eae1d5ad3b271f2d72/data/org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser.xml#L138-L154


<varlistentry>
  <term>current_folder ay</term>
  <listitem>
    <para>
      Suggested folder from which the files should be opened. The byte array
      contains a path in the same encoding as the file system, and it's
      expected to be terminated by a nul byte.
    </para>
    <para>
      If the path points to a location in the document storage, it will be
      replaced with the path to the location on the host.
    </para>
    <para>
      The portal implementation is free to ignore this option. 
    </para>
  </listitem>
</varlistentry>

It looks like all of xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, and xdg-desktop-portal-kde have been updated to support this feature too. If you want to pursue this option, we could look at pushing out updates to support it.