Google Browser Sync for Firefox

Category internet, Apple | Permalink | 17. February 2007

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I use two computers for development - a portable (MacBook Pro) and a desktop (Mac Pro). It’s helpful having the two different environments, and it’s helpful having a backup in case one of them has a problem. It does open up all sorts of issues about keeping things in sync.

I primarily use Firefox as my development web browser, for reasons I’ll get into in another article. I keep a set of bookmarks in Firefox for all the blogs and web sites I’m working with, as well as other online tools that I use (Google AdSense, Google Analytics, LinkShare…), and Firefox remembers login information for all my accounts.

It’s a pain in the ass duplicating things across instances of Firefox.

That’s where Google comes in. Google has provided a free Firefox extension which will synchronize Firefox’s bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history and even open tabs and windows, across instances of Firefox.
Apple provides browser synchronization for Safari via their for-pay service .Mac, a great service which on wishes were free. They opened up .Mac sync in MacOS X 10.4 so that other applications could do synchronization through it, and it looks like they’re opening it up further in MacOS X 10.5 and using it to synchronize preferences, Dashboard widgets, and more. But it doesn’t help with applications that no one’s written a plugin for or for cross-platform synchronization. I have to admit, I’m a little surprised that no hotshot developer has written a Firefox iSync plugin yet.

Google’s Firefox extension won’t synchronize with .Mac but it will synchronize with multiple instances of Firefox running on any platform - it’s not Macintosh-specific. So, not only can I synchronize Firefox across Macs, I can also synchronize Windows or Linux instances of it as well.

And it’s free.

I’ve tried other bookmark synchronizers in the past and they were pretty awful… they’d delay startup and shutdown of Firefox to copy files around in order to do the synchronization. Google’s extension performs synchronization in real-time, all the time that it has a network connection. There’s no delay in starting or ending Firefox.

When you set it up, you have to select a PIN (password, key) which it uses to encrypt the data it synchronizes. So although Google is holding a little bundle of data for you on its server, as long as the PIN never leaves your browser, Google can’t actually see what’s in the bundle.

It’s easy enough to install. Just download it through the link given below, follow the instructions, and you’ll be up and running in a few minutes.

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