iOS/Mac browser sync in a truly-private way

I have this situation frequently. I wind up doing a bunch of browsing on my iPhone, and because tab management there is challenging - at least partially because the screenshot that it shows in the tab switcher isn’t even always up-to-date - I wind up with a bunch of tabs.

What I need is a way to quickly dump all of my mobile tabs to my Mac, in order to be able to go through them.

There are a number of browsers that allow sync between iOS and Mac, but most of them seem to involve sending all of your browsing data up into a non-encrypted cloud service. I want to avoid that.

Safari’s implementation is so godawfully-buggy that it’s a non-starter.

So…I’m thinking I need a (non-Safari) browser that exists on Mac and iPhone, allows syncing, and does that syncing completely-privately via Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or some E2E-encrypted cloud solution. Anybody got any ideas?

I do this with Safari sometimes, it works flawlessly for me. You click the Tab Group button and at the end is a “New Tab Group with 1 Tab”. Within seconds it’s available on my iPad and Mac.

1 Like

I’ve tried this numerous times, and it just won’t take. I can see all of my iPhone tabs sometimes, but even then I have to click into each tab manually to open it. I need to be able to open 100+ tabs without 100+ clicks. :slight_smile:

Brave, Vivaldi, and Firefox all have E2EE syncing and Mac and iOS browsers

3 Likes

Oh, you’re talking about 100+ tabs, I haven’t tried it with anything close to that. 15 was probably the most I’ve ever tried.

I’ll have to look into that. I thought Brave’s sync was a non-encrypted thing. I’ll be happy to be corrected. :slight_smile:

1 Like

It’s a privacy browser, so it would be strange if it didn’t. The anti-fingerprinting is superb.

2 Likes

Do they all need to be simultaneously active in memory, though? The whole tab group looks ‘open’ on all devices as far as the tab bar goes. Syncing 100 simultaneously shouldn’t be a problem (just tested it; it will sync in batches, but come over.)

No requirement for them to all be in memory at once. I just need them to sync, so I can clear the unnecessary ones off my mobile device and process them on the desktop. :slight_smile:

Vivaldi has a great feature called Saved Sessions that lets you save all your open tabs (and windows if you want) exactly as you have them. You can close the whole thing and open it again any time you want. It’s my favorite browser for research.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Saved Sessions in the iOS app, which is fairly new. Hopefully they’ll be adding it at some point.

I think perhaps creating a dedicated Tab Group in your profile that you use exclusively on your iPhone would work? This way in Desktop you would switch to that tab group and more or less everything should be there. I do not specially love Safari tab groups but this seems to be a reasonable use case.

My sync for tab groups seems to be perpetually wonky. I think I have this sorted with Brave’s sync - I just have to play with it for a few more days and see if it’s consistent. :slight_smile:

1 Like

I advice against using Chomium based browsers on any mobile device, be it Macbook or iOS.
The browser with the least energy consumption is Safari, followed by Firefox.
Chromium browsers are resource hogs. You will notice a much lower battery life.

So Chrome on iOS, using the same rendering engine as Safari, takes massively more battery?

I have nothing against Safari on iOS. If it did what I needed to do, I would probably be using it. But all the battery savings in the world doesn’t matter if the thing doesn’t work reliably.

1 Like