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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.
How worried are you about control (i.e., is your concern that you have continued access, or is your concern that others not have access)?
If you are only concerned about continued/full access to your data, delicious has what I find to be a very acceptable statue quo:
https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all
That doesn't mean that they won't change something down the line (though I don't think they will...), but it makes it pretty easy not to be left in the lurch, just pull down all your data at comfortable intervals.
If you don't want other people to have access, never mind the solution that uses a bookmark sharing service.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Most people haven't been able to log in for the past two days, and there's no information on when it'll be fixed.
https://labs.mozilla.com/forum/index.php/topic,832.0.html
Alas, reliability is rather important for this kind of service.
In a manager's office at Google -
Employee: "You know boss, we really should devote some time to updating the Browser Sync tool to work with Firefox 3..."
Manager: "I have been meaning to talk to you about that... You see, we have been thinking about it, and there really isn't a way to make ad revenue from that tool. While it is cool and useful and all, I don't think people would be happy with ad links showing up randomly in their bookmark menus."
Employee: "Um, yeah... I agree with that. I didn't reslize..."
Manager: "The ad revenue thing? Yeah... well something has to pay for that 20% self-directed time since ad revenues are down. The good news is we think that the Google Toolbar can replace it, and we have a plan for monetizing that."
Employee: "Well, can I work on the FF3 upgrade in my 20% self-directed time and open source the tool?"
Manager: "We thought about that too - first, the Google Toolbar doesn't need the competition. Second, we can't release the code in the shape its in... people would throw our 'do no evil' slogan back at us and slashdot would be all a-titter. It would take as much to clean it up as it would just to get it to work with FF3, so we think it is at its end-of-life."
Employee: "um... o..k... thanks."
I use Google sync on three computers. Unfortunately, it frequently leaves my bookmarks unsync'ed - keeping old bookmarks on one computer, even though I've deleted them on another, and failing to include new bookmarks that I've added. I still use it because it's better than nothing. It's not much better than nothing, though.
Its kind of amazing how the ability to share bookmarks between multiple computers by simply using the same bookmarks.htm file has been removed with the new bookmarking system in Firefox 3.
I've tried sharing the places.sqlite file between Linux and Windows and it doesn't seem to work correctly and it seems like Mozilla doesn't care at all about this regression.
Having bookmarks stored on third party servers
(Mozilla weave, Foxmarks, Google browser sync, Opera's Bookmarks sync,etc ) will always suffer from insecurity mentioned in the last line of the summary.
At least Opera still has the ability to share the bookmarks file between multiple profiles/OS's/PC's.
I hate to sound a bit alarmist here, but which project can we expect to see go next?
I'm just that more hesitant to use google products, if they're prone to axing them without warning.
Use Gmarks. It lets you export your Firefox-bookmarks to the Google-bookmarks and then access it through a Firefox-menu. Once you have exported your present Firefox-bookmarks, use this GMarks menu for adding new bookmarks or deleting old ones. It seems to be a better option than the Google-sync because Google provides you a web-interface also to access the stored bookmarks. It means, u can access it anywhere, even if you are not using Firefox.
I gave up on GBS when it began to work horribly, and started using foxmarks.
When they messed foxmarks up for a few weeks I tried GBS again, but it insisted on blowing away the local bookmarks instead of, you know, syncronizing them. No matter what setting I used.
I used some other kludge which was terrible but now foxmarks works again. Personally I don't want or need my history or other stuff synchronized.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
They make it sound like the decision not to support FF3 was a recent one. Bovine excrement. They'd lost interest months ago, and never intended to add such support. I got tired of waiting a while ago, and even wrote about my switch just this past week. The same thing is happening with lots of other extensions too, such as S3 Organizer which I've also abandoned. There's an old saying that nobody sees the bodies until the tide goes out, and a major release of something like Firefox is the tide going out. That's when you get to find out about all the projects whose developers actually wandered off months ago, but nobody had noticed because nothing had broken yet. Now it's broken. It's not a big surprise in most cases, but it is a little disappointing from an organization with the resources and reputation of Google.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
On another note, they also NEED to allow us to change the synchronization interval. Auto-syncing only upon closing firefox is a horrible idea. What happens when Firefox crashes (a common occurence even with release versions, unfortunately). I'd sync every hour, if not every five minutes. Sure, that may adversely affect mozilla's servers, but my own server would be able to handle my needs just fine.
Yup, Weave is going to be taking off soon. You can find out a lot more about it here:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/06/weave-status-update/
And I talked with Sean Michael Kerner about it for a while, and he posted the video of that chat here:
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/06/mozilla-weave-gears-up-for-new.html
The extensions are what keeps me on Firefox,otherwise I would have went to the faster Kmeleon. And while we are recommending extensions,I'd like to add my vote for iMacros which I put up there with Adblock and Noscript as a "must have". Basically anything that you do repeatedly in a browser iMacros can automate it. Filling in forms,downloading files from a website,etc. And it is really simple to use: simply hit the record button and do what you would normally do,then press end and rename it something easy to remember. And it comes with a couple of dozen sample scripts that are really easy to customize for your own use. I highly recommend it!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.