Google’s browser sync
Posted on February 20, 2007
Filed Under computers
Many nights, surfing (ahem, I mean, ah, researching) on-line, I want to look at a website I found earlier — maybe hours, days, or months earlier. I look through my Bookmarks and can’t find the link I know I saved. But the next day, back at the office, I find the Bookmark on my computer at work. That’s because I found the page and saved it while I was at work. I’ve done this often enough so that I now have two lists of Bookmarks. Once each list got long enough, I couldn’t remember where I’ve saved something and where I haven’t.
If you’re the kind of person who keeps a strict separation between work and home, then having separate lists of Bookmarks (in Mozilla’s Firefox) or Favorites (Internet Explorer) makes sense. But as long as you use more than one computer (say, a desktop and a laptop — or, like me, one at work, one at home and no Berlin wall between) and you want to access all of your bookmarks from either, then you’ve run into the frustration of asynchronous lists.
Some early attempts at solving this problem were web-based (see del.icio.us or mybookmarks.com for examples). Web-based solutions always seemed clunky to me – why would I want to log-in to a website to keep up with my Bookmarks?
Google browser sync solves this problem by keeping your Bookmarks synchronized across all computers on which the program is installed.
Google browser sync is an xpi extension for the Firefox browser. If you don’t know what an xpi extension is, think of it like a customization for your browser. Yes, you can install little tools in Firefox that allow you to customize it in certain ways. What the browser sync does is it allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer on which you have the sync installed. Pretty cool, eh?
You install it on computers you use regularly, and it keeps your bookmarks (including toolbar bookmarks, the ones that appear just under the url bar) synchronized. Be aware that it also syncs your saved passwords, saved form fields, and anything else that you’ve told Firefox to remember. The browser sync tool also remembers the pages you were looking at the last time you shut down Firefox. So with the browser sync installed, when you launch the browser, a dialogue bubble asks whether you’d like to pick up where you left off last time.
From the website — http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/
Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.
Because it synchronizes passwords, this is not something to install on a computer that is not your own. It’s not a good idea to install it on a public computer. But for any computer that you use regularly and to which you have secure access, browser sync helps keep your midnight research flowing.
N.B. — Google has entered the web-based bookmarks game as well. If browser sync is not something for you, because of its security-related concerns, then web-based solutions may be the way to go. Try Google Bookmarks, as well as del.icio.us and others.
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