14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome is already one of the fastest and most innovative browsers available but that alone doesn't guarantee a great number of users and doesn't make up for the lack of features, especially in such a competitive market. Better theme support is coming and is already available in the developer releases and now a new feature, which should be a natural for a Google browser, has been announced in the Chromium developer group, namely data sync between different Chrome installs courtesy of the all-powerful cloud.
In a post on the Chrome message board, Google software engineer Tim Steele announced the upcoming feature and described how it would work and what the early implementations would offer. “A bunch of us have been working on a feature to sync user data in Chromium with a Google account. (Surprise! :)) The great news is that we'll be starting to work directly in the Chromium project this week, and let me tell you, are we excited to do that!,“ he wrote. “We will be landing this code in a few steps rather than one giant changelist for a number of reasons.”
The move involves some pretty complex code and this is one of the reasons why the feature will be gradually rolled out, ensuring better scrutiny of the code by the outside contributors to the project. The second reason for the delay has to do with the way the code was developed, behind closed doors, typical to Google development. This meant that progress was made relatively fast but it also meant using some internal libraries and, most importantly, developing the server side of the project. As the server gets open sourced more features will be added.
For now the feature will only support bookmark synchronization but it was developed to handle settings and customizations and other kind of data as well. While a similar project, Mozilla Weave Sync, is underway for Firefox, the feature could be of even greater importance to Google, with its dependence on web apps and the plan to launch Chrome OS, which it boasts as an almost exclusive cloud-based operating system.