Slashdot Mirror
Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued
Dude With An Afro writes "What could have been a great Google project is now history. For those who never used it, Google Browser Sync was a Firefox extension that synchronized your bookmarks, web history, browser sessions and passwords across multiple computers by temporarily saving them to Google's servers. According to the Google Browser Sync team: 'It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don't have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.' For all of those who fell in love with Google's Browser Sync, our only hope now is to resort to poorly maintained 3rd party extensions without Google's blessing." While it was undoubtedly a useful utility, the argument can also be made that it wasn't the most secure extension in the world, what with having your personal data kept on Google's servers and shot around the internet.
the newly released Opera 9.5 has introduced a sync'ing capability.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I think it's a little mean to refer to Foxmarks as a "poorly maintained 3rd party extension." I've been using it since before Google's browser sync existed, and I never bothered to try out Google's extension because Foxmarks worked perfectly. If you need a replacement, I would recommend checking them out.
I've been using Bookmarks Sync and Sort for quite a while now - all you need is a FTP/WebDAV server on which you have an account, which I guess every slashdotter should have...
The extension does everything I need, and it works like a charm; the only problem is that is not (currently) FF3 compatible.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
Look into foxmarks (assuming you use firefox). It works decently well, and it has firefox 3 support. I never switched to Google's thing, because foxmarks seemed better.
http://labs.mozilla.com/featured-projects/#weave
Syncs lots of things, including bookmarks.
Mozilla Weave does similar stuff... http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/
I've been using it for a while and it's pretty good, even though it's still under lots of development.
check foxmarks you can tell it where to ftp your bookmarks to if you don't want to use their servers.
The reason googles sync is/was better is because it not only does the one thing (everything) foxmarks does, but it also syncs your firefox cookies, saved passwords (very important one that!) and your history.
What I would like is a firefox extension that does basically what google browser sync does, except you can point it to a server of your own, and the backend software is available to install.
There are a few extensions that can sync only your bookmarks to a server you can run yourself, mostly using open standard protocols, but nothing that will sync everything, including your saved passwords and cookies.
So what other bookmark-sync should I switch to?
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I was a heavy user of GBS for a while. Very nice tool, but they never did fix very problematic bugs in the bookmark syncing part of it. I almost immediately gave up on the windows syncing, and I had fairly quickly stopped using the cookie-syncing part when I discovered the cookies were breeding like coat hangers in a closet. Essentially there was too much state information that wasn't been tracked but which was needed to make things work properly, especially for the bookmarks.
As noted by many others, Foxmarks does a good job of the bookmark part of syncing. The heuristics are kind of flawed, but it's never caused the kinds of bookmark disasters that were frequent with GBS.
The last feature of GBS that I abandoned was the password syncing. This was an extremely useful capability and (AFaIK) unique to GBS. I'm not sure it was working correctly, but rather it may have had some of the same problems as the bookmark syncing, but less severe, perhaps because of the absence of dividers or more consistency in the way different versions handled the passwords. However, this may have been the security-related problem that caused Google to abandon the idea. The security model was actually very good (if I understand it properly). The encryption and decryption were handled on the client side, and Google's servers actually had no access to the data, just storing the encrypted files. You were the sole owner of your security key--and many people then proceeded to lose it and then complained to Google about the 'lost' data. (I think Google should have tried to set up some kind of key escrow service, but I don't blame them for steering clear of that difficult business.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Mozilla is actually working on an extension called Weave that essentially does everything it sounds like GBS did. At least, I know it syncs bookmarks, history, and cookies, and other things.
All your base are belong to Wii.