14 DAY TRIAL // Google is pushing hard with development of its web browser Google Chrome with three consecutive development branches and reaching version 4.0 in the dev channel. Not that version numbers mean that much to Google developers. While Chrome still has some way to go before becoming a fully functioning browser, it’s adding features at an increased pace and the latest experimental release now has support for bookmark syncing, a feature previewed a couple of weeks ago.
Chrome dev channel release, intended for developers and advanced users, has been recently bumped to version 4.0, this while the beta has just reached version 3.0 and the stable release is still at 2.0. The very latest developer release, 4.0.201.1, now enables bookmark syncing between different installs.
“As of today's dev channel build, we're adding a brand new feature to Google Chrome: bookmark sync. Many users have several machines, one at home and one at work for example. This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access,” Tim Steele, Google software engineer, wrote.
The feature isn't enabled by default even in the dev release and users have to launch the browser with the “--enable-sync” argument either from the command line or by adding it to the shortcut in the “target” box. After this a new menu item will show up in the tools (wrench) menu. Users are then asked to log in with their Google account credentials and they're good to go.
After everything is set up Chrome will upload the bookmarks and save them with the users' Google Docs files. Any modification to the bookmarks are then synchronized with the cloud using the XMPP protocol and at the same time broadcast to the other browsers for which the users have enabled bookmark syncing.
Bookmark syncing isn't exactly new technology; Apple's Safari has the feature and several Firefox icons provide the same functionality. Mozilla is also working on a broader project, Weave, which enables bookmark and settings syncing for now but has a wider proposed scope. Google is also looking ahead – while bookmark syncing may not look like much of a technical challenge, the scope is to have a solid syncing technology in time for the upcoming Chrome OS, which should make extensive use of this type of features.
Google Chrome is available for download here.