Google Chrome to get bookmarks synchronization

Main hurdle for users to switch from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome is the lack of add-ons and features like bookmarks sync and others. But those days are numbered as Google Chrome is added support for extensions in the recent developer builds and now they are adding support for bookmark synchronization. According to a note posted on Chromium-dev Google Groups, Google Chrome will allow you to sync bookmarks with Google accounts.

A bunch of us have been working on a feature to sync user data in Chromium with a Google account. We have built a library that implements the client side of our sync protocol, as well as the Google server-side infrastructure to serve Google Chrome users and synchronize data to their Google Account.  Of course, all the code going into Chromium is open source, and the messages between the client and server use the open protobuf format and library. Tim Steele wrote on the Google Groups.

The sync support is not restricted to only browser bookmarks but it may extend to additional data types. The feature will be available with in a week or so in the chromium developer builds, if you run dev build  you will get this through a dev-channel update this month.

According to the design document, users can connect to the server from multiple clients simultaneously, changes made in one client will immediately be reflected in other clients connected to the server. The changes made to bookmarks while not connecting to the server will be synced later when connected to the server.

Interestingly Google is using Google Talk servers to push the bookmark syncing instead of relying on polling at a specified interval, that means your bookmarks are synced real time.

If you are using Firefox , Mozilla weave is a similar project for syncing Firefox data with mozilla servers and there is also an add-on Xmarks (previously Foxmarks) for syncing browser data.

Via Arstechnica