Mozilla’s first foray into Apple’s idevice walled garden is an odd mix of empowering, forward-thinking functionality and some head scratching omissions. Still, if you’re a big fan of Mozilla’s top browser, Sync is free and provides a relatively easy way to unify bookmarks across multiple devices.

After installing Firefox Home (iTunes, free) on your idevice, tapping the app informs that you must up a Sync account. Unsaid is the fact that Sync requires the Firefox Sync Add-on running in Firefox on your computer.

After installing and restarting Sync on your Mac, you will need to either log into your Sync account or setup a new one. This process takes only a few moments with the only wrinkle being that you must also provide a secret pass phrase, which is yet another thing to remember.

Syncing and using…

Back on your idevice, your first sync will take, depending on your connection and how much stuff (history, bookmarks, tabs) you’ve got, from five to 10 minutes. That said, as far as I can tell, this appears to be a one-way process (i.e. Mac to idevice).

This is probably due to the fact that Firefox Home isn’t a standalone web browser and, in fact, it doesn’t offer the ability to manually type in URLs or create new bookmarks. Further, as there’s no address/search bar, if you want to search, you must first load a search engine webpage and the only way to have that available is to first bookmark it in the desktop version of Firefox and then sync it over.

Yes, there is a search button, but that only allows to search within the tabs, history and bookmarks sync’d from the desktop version.

For whatever reason, Sync didn’t include Bookmark Bar bookmarks, which is a crucial omission for me as some sites are only listed there and nowhere else in Firefox.

Home, which isn’t a universal app, running either 1X or pixel doubled on my iPad, is extremely crashy. Of all the non-universal apps I have tried or run none crashes like this.

Worse, crashes can result in bookmarks and tabs getting erased. So, it’s another five or 10 minutes to resync data.

Syncing between two Macs is a breeze with the one problem being that menubar bookmarks originally imported from Safari didn’t make it through the process.

Goodbye anyway

If you’re a Firefox fan and need to sync between multiple computers and idevices, this is the way to go. So, the workday is done, but your research isn’t — now you can take that with you on your idevice or sync to another computer.

Oddly enough, I removed Firefox, which I had used for social networking and paying certain bills, from my Mac’s Dock yesterday and moved to Chrome as all of the plug-ins and add-ons I needed are now available for Google’s webkit-based browser. Yes, Firefox is still in the Apps folder of the two Macs I’m currently using, but not likely for long.

So, Sync? Thumbs up, a must-have feature for Firefox users. Firefox Home? A non-solution to problems I don’t have…

What’s your take?