Life is grand

Google have released a browser synchroniser extension for Firefox. I was thrilled to read about it and quickly installed the extension. The idea is you install the extension on multiple computers and your settings are saved with your Google account. Then whenever you swap computers your Firefox settings will follow.

Sadly it is not quite all that I was expecting. It only syncs cookies, saved passwords, bookmarks, your history and tabs/windows. Synchronising cookies is useful as is saved passwords. But of the people who will use this extension how many still use bookmarks as opposed to delicious or BlinkList? I haven’t bookmarked a site in Firefox in ages. The history sync is useful for some but now that I am using the Attention Trust Recorder it is not going to change my life. The tabs/windows restorer sounds great but doesn’t work half as well as SessionSaver (it really only reloads the URL. SessionSaver will restore the state of the page including field values, tab history etc.)

So all in all not terribly useful. Not yet at least. I’d like to see Google extend the syncher to include extensions, themes, browser settings and layout. If they did that it would be a very useful tool indeed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 at 9:44 am and is filed under Browser, Extension, Firefox, Google, Sync. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.