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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*
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.
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.
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.
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.
But without a syncing mechanism, you have to be meticulous about making sure you always to it. What if you add 20 bookmarks at home and a different 20 at work between copies? You'd have to decide which 20 was more important so that you can overwrite the others.
I'm kind of opposed to native Firefox solutions on general principals, though. That doesn't work so well if you also want to use your bookmarks from IE at the office and Safari on your iPhone (disclaimer: I have neither - work with me here). Sites like del.icio.us are a much better idea, in my opinion, although I don't like the idea of giving up control over your own data.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
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.