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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.
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
Browser Sync was so awesome, I'll miss it *slits wrists*
Foxmarks works fine for me.
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.
Um, wasn't Google browser sync also a third party extension?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Google should know better. Abandonware? Open source it! Then if people care they can upgrade it for FF3.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
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.
I use del.icio.us
Granted, it only saves bookmarks, but I wouldn't be comfortable with all that other stuff being anywhere else but my machine anyway. My passwords I don't even like being on my machine. I keep them in my head.
Technoli
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.
So you are suggesting we use a Windows-only application? Thanks, but no thanks!
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've been using browsersync since it came out and it worked reasonably well except for the periodic trashing or losing of my bookmarks. It just seems really strange to me that there is not a good solution in this space as most people user multiple machines between home and work.
Is this because its a hard problem or is it because there is no opportunity to make money from it?
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
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.
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.
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.
At least in FireFox, your bookmarks just exist as a plain ol' HTML file in your profile directory. You don't need any special tools to sync that across multiple machines, you just copy it between machines (or better, use FireFox Portable off a thumbdrive).
However, for those who really need their bookmarks accessible from anywhere, an old and simple method will completely solve your problem - Keep your bookmarks on a live website and set that to your homepage. When you want to add new ones, add them to the online version rather than locally. Problem solved, no help from Google required.
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.
Google toolbar has a bookmarks button that is a nice and easy way to make your bookmarks available wherever you browse (even across browsers).
... I laughed out loud when I read that. S/he is living in some parallel universe if s/he thinks Google doesn't have plenty of information about our browsing history or tendencies. Do you use Gmail? Do you use Google to search? Do you use the Google toolbar? Adding my bookmarks to the mix doesn't seem to make my "personal data" any less secure.
As to the note in the OP about Google having all our personal data on their servers
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
i am disappointed in firefox-3.x new features, (just useless feature bloat to me) i went back to using Seamonkey which is the original Mozilla browser code released to the FOSS community to keep developed and maintained, i like it...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
"undoubtedly a useful utility "???
Slashdot couldn't say anything nice about it when it came out. You ranted about privacy issues over and over. Now it's dead and you helped kill it.
I found the program extremely useful and now it's gone.
Thanks.
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.
"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'm using FF 3 and this still works. Mod parent overrated.
"
What the
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Bookmarks, bookmarks, bookmarks. Foxmarks and other add-ons will sync bookmarks. BFD.
It was the sync'd web sessions/cookies and passwords that made Google's add-on unique and incredibly useful for someone who had to use multiple computers at multiple locations throughout the day.
It's too bad all of you who are pushing Foxmarks as a replacement don't know that.
ftp puts the 's' in secure
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.
Seriously, why has nobody solved this problem in a good way. I have multiple computers and devices that I want to sync my bookmarks with. I don't use just 1 browser, I generally use 3. Safari for those things tied into the OS. Like bring up Google maps from an address. Firefox 3 for daily browsing and use. Opera for some sites I visit that render ultra fast on it.
.Mac that only work for Safari. On Windows there are many utilities that handle syncing bookmarks. (Hell, IE saves bookmarks as files ... not a bad idea) Firefox is a bastard when it comes to this because bookmarks.html isn't reliable. You can read from it, just not write to it. Some services use a plugin, but aren't ported to Firefox 3 .. also no ETA. I haven't looked at Operas bookmarks, so I dunno how it is.
I know I am not alone. Many people (especially developers) have this problem and there isn't many choices. On the Mac you have services like
I just want all of my bookmarks to be centralized. I don't want social bookmarks, I want them private. They can be stored on a "public" system, I have nothing to hide in them. I just don't want them exposed to the general public, I like privacy and I don't want to be part of a data mining experiment.
There are also some sites that you can post your bookmarks to, but I want them locally. No real reason other then I like them in the browser it self.
I have also tried to solve this in the past, but Firefox really makes it difficult to pull off because of how they handle bookmarks.html If you know a way to solve this feel free to contact me.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
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.
>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.'
That hasn't stopped google from keeping *every other items in googles product lineup*.
Seriously though, google has *way* too many products, many of which are buggy, feature incomplete, and in perpetual beta status. It is about time they trimmed the fat in a big way and focused on improving their successful products, rather than trying to have a dinky and ignored entry in every category.
Personally, I use:
1. Search
2. Ads
3. Gmail (still in beta and now falling behind the competition...)
4. Reader (which, in terms of design, is probably the best google app ever)
5. Google groups (pretty good, but could see a lot of improvement)
6. Youtube (which has also fallen *way* behind the competition in terms of video resolution).
These are the products they need to improve, instead of letting every engineer scratch his personal itch.