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Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the going-gently-into-that-good-night dept.

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.

6 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mozilla Weave by keesh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Obligatory conspiracy theory by bokmann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."

  3. Bookmark sharing without using third party servers by ck_808 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Great... which project is next? by merreborn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Alternatives? by Christophotron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Mozilla Weave is doing this. I'm not sure of when details will be released on the server software, but I believe that is the idea: that if you want to, you can run your own server and point the extension at it. This sounds awesome, as I would be able to continue using Weave while Mozilla are screwing around with their servers during the development process. I can't tell you how many times Weave has refused to sync due to some "server lock error" and other crap like that. I even tried clearing out the server data and resetting the locks using the debug menu provided. Weave just has a lot of major development issues that need to be worked out, but when it actually works, it works pretty well. Having some level of control over my own data storage is definitely a step in the right direction, and I didn't even know they were planning this. Weave may turn out to be better than GBS after all!

    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.

  6. Re:Mozilla Weave by feelafel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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