What are you looking at when you made the determination that two of your devices "show the old Sync"?

Please provide screenshots. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-create-screenshot-my-problem

It is best to use a compressed image type like PNG or JPG to save the screenshot and make sure that you do not exceed a maximum file size of 1 MB.

Then use the Browse .... button below the Post a Reply text box to upload the screenshot.

To transition to the new sync for all devices you need to unlink the old sync.

• See Sync your Firefox bookmarks, history, passwords and more

Please be aware before doing this that

• New Sync has only the one mode merge. You can not choose the direction of syncing.
• Also you may wish to manually backup bookmarks on all devices before making such a change, and periodically afterwards. Sync is not very good at handling big changes in bookmarks listings. Sometimes corruption, or duplication may occur.
  • Restore bookmarks from backup or move them to another computer_manual-backup

the-edmeister said

What are you looking at when you made the determination that two of your devices "show the old Sync"?

The old syncs display the 'pair a device' notice but do not refer to a Firefox account, while the new one does not refer to pairing (as per the description on the support pages, cf. screenshots). Also, the two old installments keep in sync, the new one does not.

The new installment did notify the new syncing method at one point. However, I had not actually unpaired it, up until the new sync showed up, that FF installment kept in sync with the other two. So I was under the impression that switching to (or being urged to switch to) the new method would be automatic when updating FF.

John99 said

To transition to the new sync for all devices you need to unlink the old sync.

• See Sync your Firefox bookmarks, history, passwords and more

Thanks, I will try that (later, as one of the systems is not at hand at this moment).

Note there are plans to deprecate the old sync

• https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2015/02/03/legacy-sync-migration

fixed the hyperlink to that blog article

rruules said

the-edmeister said

What are you looking at when you made the determination that two of your devices "show the old Sync"?

The old syncs display the 'pair a device' notice but do not refer to a Firefox account, while the new one does not refer to pairing (as per the description on the support pages, cf. screenshots). Also, the two old installments keep in sync, the new one does not.

The new installment did notify the new syncing method at one point. However, I had not actually unpaired it, up until the new sync showed up, that FF installment kept in sync with the other two. So I was under the impression that switching to (or being urged to switch to) the new method would be automatic when updating FF.

That happened for me with two different Sync accounts - where devices were being used with the older version of Sync and then those accounts were updated to the new version of Sync still showed the older "Pair a Device" and "Unlink" at the bottom rather than the newer "Disconnect" in the upper-right corner of that panel. But any new device being connected to one of those updated Sync accounts shows the updated version of that panel. And new Sync accounts only show the new panel style and wording.

Although the older Sync is still active, being that the email address / user account name is the same, you are using the new Sync version on all devices that are on that account. Your account on the Sync server was updated when you "updated" the first device, and wouldn't work after that on a device with the old Sync version - that old account was basically "gone" after the first device was updated.

I tried searching Bugzilla for a Bug for that a few times over the last 8 months, but there's so damn many Bug reports for "Firefox Sync" that it almost impossible to zero in on Firefox - Sync - Windows desktop - UI to see a list of Bugs that is related to the Windows desktop UI panel and an account that went thru an update in the services version. Many searches I did came up with multiple pages of results, with 500 Bug reports per page.

Plus there is no user-facing version numbers for the 3 major versions of Sync. Which I think were 1.0 for the installable-extension version, named Weave, and then in the lead-up to Firefox 4.0 [where Sync became a standard feature in Firefox] when the "Sync key" was changed from user supplied to automatically generated came version 1.0, and with Firefox 29 came the version 1.5 - or is that a 1.3#.# number to confuse the situation???

Mozilla has many support / information pages that call the Firefox 29-plus version of Sync version 1.5, yet the Sync error logs show a different number - as with this from one of my error-logs when Firefox 31.0 was the current release version - Sync.Service INFO Loading Weave 1.33.0 That number vs. this blog article - https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/05/08/firefox-accounts-sync-1-5-and-self-hosting/ - just me, of it that confusing things?

https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2015/02/03/legacy-sync-migration/

So basically they are saying that Sync 1.1 service cut-off is being geared around the life of ESR 31 versions. Mozilla will keep the "old" service running until after the last ESR 31 version is released, two point # versions into ESR 38 before the "switch is pulled".

And they kindly note that users can still use the "old" service if they are custom / self-hosting their own Sync 1.1 server - old "Sync" vs.a Firefox Accounts / Sync 1.5 server.

thanks to John for posting that hyperlink - I hadn't seen it yet

Finally got round to unlinking then connecting to the sync service, and that worked.

• See Sync your Firefox bookmarks, history, passwords and more ~J99

Glad to hear it works, thanks for posting back. I will mark your post as the solution and add a link to

• See Sync your Firefox bookmarks, history, passwords and more