I honestly want to ditch Firefox and try a Chromium browser for a minute [1], but I'm stuck on Firefox because it's the only one with a killer feature: send a tab to/from iOS and my Linux desktop.

I skip Chrome and Edge for privacy reasons, Brave have a crappy and buggy sync feature that I don't know what OSes it supports, but not my combination. Can't send tabs with them. Vivaldi doesn't have an iOS port. Impossible to do with Chromium.

Firefox can send tabs to all my machines, and I use that feature multiple times daily, such as finding a cool article while I'm sitting on the couch and sending it to my desktop so I can read it later. Mr. Eich, if you're around here, please please fix syncing tabs in your browser, it's the only thing stopping me from switching honestly.

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1: I quite like Firefox, but it's in a dying spiral, and I'm starting to see broken sites. The Web is such a complicated nightmare "protesting" won't change anything, and forking neither, because it's too bloody complex. Chromium has won. Our only hope is Mozilla takes their head out of their arse and start working on their browser instead of faffing about and making small, meaningless changes every release, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

The super-annoying thing about that, is that you need a Sync-Server, and an "Identity" server to run this all without having sign in to "Firefox Sync".

The sync-server is trivial to run via docker, but (last time i checked) running the other essential part yourself is (intentionally?) not easy at all.

Is this serious? Your criciticism is that... they offer their service and the possibility to self-host?

No, I meant, they make it look like you could do this all easily without external clouds, but then the Identity-server, which I cannot imagine to be much more complicated w.r.t. functionality that e.g. a Samba4 AD-DC, is/was(last time i checked) basically undocumented and looked intentionally overbuilt (again, comparing with e.g. Samba4-AD). And not open-source (iirc). Also, why can't I use a standard Directory Server, instead of their home-built one-off-solution?

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

It includes a Docker Compose setup.

Standard directory servers aren't specifically built for end-to-end encryption, while data in Firefox Sync is end-to-end encrypted by default. Firefox Sync must also scale to support the millions of Firefox users who use Mozilla's instance.