Google Chrome to Get Preferences and Theme Sync

Google Chrome has had bookmark sync for a few months now, even the stable build got the feature at the beginning of the year. The sync feature in Chrome, at the moment, does exactly what the name implies, it synchronizes your bookmarks between your computers to have access to them wherever you may be browsing from. But that's it, bookmarks and nothing more. That may change soon, though, as it looks like Google Chrome is about to get a much more thorough sync feature that will keep in tune all of your preferences and even the themes between different installs.

The latest Chromium builds, the open-source project on which Google Chrome is based, already sync more than just your bookmarks, typed URLs for example are shared between installs. And the functionality is about to go deeper as recent additions to the Chromium source code indicate that the browser will soon be able to sync themes as well, as Downloadsquad uncovered.

The latest Google Chrome dev builds only support bookmark syncing, at least for now, this despite usually being very close, in terms of features, to the Chromium versions they're based on. The difference is also noticeable in the dialog box the two browsers display when enabling sync.

For Chromium, the message says, "Chromium Sync makes it easy to keep the same set of data (such as bookmarks and preferences) on multiple computers. When you enable syncing, your Chromium data will get stored online in your Google Account. Each additional computer on which you enable syncing will receive the same Chromium data."

Google Chrome, on the other hand, just says, "Bookmark Sync makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on multiple computers. When you enable sync, your bookmarks will get stored online in your Google Account. Each additional computer on which you enable sync will receive the same bookmarks."

Data like autofill, preferences and typed URLs are already synced in the latest Chromium 5.0.369.0 (43471) nightly builds, but theme sync doesn't seem to be working yet. Still, Chromium development moves pretty fast, so the full sync features may be coming soon, which is when they will probably be enabled in Google Chrome too.