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Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Jun 14, 2008 08:14 AM
from the going-gently-into-that-good-night dept.
Businesses Google The Internet Privacy
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.
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Submission: Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued by Anonymous Coward
[+] Google Browser Sync Source Released 33 comments
AySz88 writes "Google has made an official announcement of their decision to discontinue Google Browser Sync. But it comes with a brighter side — its source code is now open and available."
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  • Fear not... (Score:3, Informative)

    by msauve (701917) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:20AM (#23790971)
    the newly released Opera 9.5 [opera.com] has introduced a sync'ing capability.

    • Re:Fear not... (Score:5, Funny)

      by schon (31600) on Saturday June 14 2008, @09:04AM (#23791205) Homepage

      the newly released Opera 9.5 has introduced a sync'ing capability.
      Cool! But I looked at your link, and there's no mention of a Firefox extension.

      Could you provide a better link for it?

    • Re:Fear not... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ambush Commander (871525) on Saturday June 14 2008, @10:45AM (#23791895)
      I have mod points, but I have to point out here that Opera Sync currently only works with your bookmarks and your speed dial, making it Opera's built-in equivalent of Foxmarks (which I myself have been using happily). It is no Google Browser Sync replacement.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by flappinbooger (574405)
        I gave up on GBS when it began to work horribly, and started using foxmarks.

        When they messed foxmarks up for a few weeks I tried GBS again, but it insisted on blowing away the local bookmarks instead of, you know, syncronizing them. No matter what setting I used.

        I used some other kludge which was terrible but now foxmarks works again. Personally I don't want or need my history or other stuff synchronized.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by hairyfeet (841228)
        FEBE [mozilla.org] is what works for me,and it does so much more than simple bookmarks. I can save my preferences,themes,passwords,extensions,search history,etc. I simply save it to a folder and keep it on my flash drive. And if you need access from anywhere simply make a password protected zip folder or self extracting password protected .exe and email it to yourself. Then you have everything in an easy to use form without worrying about it being a security risk. But that is my 02c,YMMV

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Jugalator (259273)
          IMO, their bittorrent client sucked compared to uTorrent in 9.0 as well. I just reconfigured the .torrent filetype to use that app instead. I can't blame Opera for trying though; I think it's becoming as natural as having FTP support these days. It makes sense to me, and fills a niche, to support P2P by supporting the most common protocol as well. One could've hoped for a better client though.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by hairyfeet (841228)
          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 [mozilla.org] 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 t

  • This makes me cry... (Score:4, Funny)

    by -Neko- (67564) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:20AM (#23790977) Homepage
    Browser Sync was so awesome, I'll miss it *slits wrists*
  • The only part of it I use actively is the bookmarks sync, which is, although slightly buggy, very useful

    So what other bookmark-sync should I switch to?

    I'm not intersted in thos bookmark sharing services, just having my own bookmarks synced between the computers I use regularly.

    • Re:Alternatives? (Score:5, Informative)

      by seriv (698799) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:30AM (#23791031)
      Look into foxmarks [foxmarks.com] (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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by dissy (172727)

        Look into foxmarks [foxmarks.com] (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.

        From the URL there, it appears all foxmarks can do is sync your bookmarks.

        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 syn

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Bieeanda (961632)

          From the URL there, it appears all foxmarks can do is sync your bookmarks.
          ...and from the question the grandparent post asked, bookmark synching was all that he wanted to do.

        • Re:Alternatives? (Score:4, Informative)

          by FishWithAHammer (957772) on Saturday June 14 2008, @10:40AM (#23791865)
          Did you even bother to read the grandparent post?

          The only part of it I use actively is the bookmarks sync, which is, although slightly buggy, very useful

          So what other bookmark-sync should I switch to?

          • Re:Alternatives? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Christophotron (812632) on Saturday June 14 2008, @02:32PM (#23793681)

            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.

  • Foxmarks is great (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoelMeow (740794) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:27AM (#23791015) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Foxmarks is great (Score:4, Informative)

      by AySz88 (1151141) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:57AM (#23791165)
      Indeed, the Google message actually recommends Foxmarks, if you read the article. It also recommends Mozilla Weave and Google Toolbar as bookmark-syncing alternatives (well, once Google Toolbar gets Firefox 3 compatibility). Mozilla Weave might not even be considered "third party".

      That terminating single quote in the summary is awfully easy to miss... (Bad submitter, bad!)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pugdk (697845)
      I fully agree. While I have never used Google browser sync I have used Foxmarks for quite some time with no hassle at all.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rearden (304396)
      My issue with Foxmarks is that it does not do everything that Google Browser Sync does. Having an encrypted copy of my passwords and bookmarks and cookies was nice. I dont save banking or high-security passwords anyway, but all of those fourm and other site usernames & passwords- nice!

      Google Browser Sync you will be missed!

    • Re:Foxmarks is great (Score:5, Informative)

      by Niten (201835) on Saturday June 14 2008, @10:23AM (#23791757) Homepage

      I think it's a little mean to refer to Foxmarks as a "poorly maintained 3rd party extension."

      Yeah, that comment reeks of spite and ignorance. It also glosses over the privacy issues that kept many from using Google Browser Sync to begin with, but which aren't an issue with Foxmarks.

      And anyway, I'm much more willing to trust Foxmarks to store my private data than I am Google -- unlike Google, Foxmarks is not one of the world's fastest-growing advertising companies; and unlike Google, Foxmarks is founded by Mitch Kapor, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Better still, the Foxmarks extension allows you to use your own server for synchronization, if you're so paranoid that you don't even trust your data in the hands of an EFF founder.

      If anything can be called a "poorly maintained 3rd party extension" here, it would have to be Google Browser Sync -- which, I suppose, is why it has fallen out of favor.

    • Re:Foxmarks is great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by samkass (174571) on Saturday June 14 2008, @10:30AM (#23791797) Homepage Journal
      Indeed, Google Browser Sync is itself a "poorly maintained 3rd party extension" at this point, so I don't know why that distinction was made between GBS and the other plug-ins that do the same thing.

  • Sync and Sort? (Score:4, Informative)

    by PontifexPrimus (576159) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:28AM (#23791021)
    I've been using Bookmarks Sync and Sort [mozilla.org] 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.

  • Third party extensions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by langelgjm (860756) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:30AM (#23791033) Journal

    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.

    Um, wasn't Google browser sync also a third party extension?

  • So why not open source it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by molo (94384) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:31AM (#23791037) Journal
    Google should know better. Abandonware? Open source it! Then if people care they can upgrade it for FF3.

    -molo

  • Mozilla Weave is working great for me (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:35AM (#23791051)
    http://labs.mozilla.com/featured-projects/#weave

    Syncs lots of things, including bookmarks.

  • Mozilla Weave (Score:5, Informative)

    by beezly (197427) <beezly@@@beezly...org...uk> on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:36AM (#23791061) Homepage
    Mozilla Weave does similar stuff... http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/ [mozilla.com]

    I've been using it for a while and it's pretty good, even though it's still under lots of development.

  • Meh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Conspiracy_Of_Doves (236787) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:39AM (#23791079)
    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.

  • Obligatory conspiracy theory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bokmann (323771) on Saturday June 14 2008, @08:57AM (#23791169) Homepage
    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."

  • Strange that there are no good solutions (Score:4, Insightful)

    by smartin (942) on Saturday June 14 2008, @09:04AM (#23791199)
    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?

  • Bookmark sharing without using third party servers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ck_808 (1302625) on Saturday June 14 2008, @09:22AM (#23791321)
    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 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...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Daimanta (1140543)
      "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.
      "

      What the ...? I'm using FF 3 and this still works. Mod parent overrated.

  • So just go back to the "old school" solution... (Score:3, Informative)

    by pla (258480) on Saturday June 14 2008, @09:22AM (#23791323) Journal
    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.

    • 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).

      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.

  • Great... which project is next? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by merreborn (853723) on Saturday June 14 2008, @09:26AM (#23791343) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Check out bookmarks on the Google toolbar (Score:4, Insightful)

    by LaughingCoder (914424) on Saturday June 14 2008, @09:32AM (#23791397)
    Google toolbar has a bookmarks button that is a nice and easy way to make your bookmarks available wherever you browse (even across browsers).

    As to the note in the OP about Google having all our personal data on their servers ... 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.

  • Interesting tool, but flawed... (Score:4, Informative)

    by shanen (462549) on Saturday June 14 2008, @11:10AM (#23792055) Homepage Journal
    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.)

  • Common Problem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Salamander (33735) <jeff AT pl DOT atyp DOT us> on Saturday June 14 2008, @01:16PM (#23792953) Homepage Journal
    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 [pl.atyp.us] 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.

  • Why does this have to be so complicated (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SnapperHead (178050) on Saturday June 14 2008, @03:04PM (#23793953) Homepage Journal
    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.

    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 .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 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.

  • Really? (Score:3, Informative)

    by sentientbrendan (316150) on Saturday June 14 2008, @07:59PM (#23796089)
    >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.

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