If you have been keeping tabs on the official Google Blog, you might notice that a couple of days ago [1] they announced the Google Browser Sync extension for the Firefox web browser.

Product Manager Brian Rakowski states:

…unifies your bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and persistent cookies across all the computers where you install it. It also remembers which tabs and windows you had open when you last closed any of your browsers and gives you a chance to reopen them.

Apple Mac OS X users already have this ability on their Safari web browsers with a little help from [2] .Mac Sync (pronounced dot-mac-sync).  This is one of the many reasons why .Mac is appealing; the ability to synchronise your bookmarks (among other things) across any Mac that you log on to. However, unlike .Mac, Google Browser Sync is free.

Now this functionality has been extended all major operating sytems i.e. OS X, Windows XP, Linux, etc. as long as Firefox 1.5 or later is installed and you have a Google account.  This is ideal if you work on multiple workstations or laptops (like yours truly), be it at work or at home.

Your Google account name (which is basically your Gmail address) is shown next to the Google Browser Sync icon on your Firefox web browser. This is how it looks like when it’s active:

The primary fuction of this extension is, as we all already know, that it allows you to synchronise all your bookmarks and browser history. The synchronisation process is fully automated and happens during launch (and quit) of your Firefox web browser. However, it also synchronises tabs and windows sessions as well.

So if you were browsing a few sites on your work computer, you could log on to your computer at home or another computer miles away, launch Firefox and continue where you left off. How cool is that?  It also allows you to choose which tab and window sessions you would like to resume; another uber-cool feature. If you don’t like it for whatever reason, you could turn this feature off.

As an added bonus, this extension makes a complete backup of all your bookmarks. If your system suffered a fatal crash, you can simply retrieve your bookmarks by installing the plugin again and logging in. I failed to see this mentioned anywhere on their website nor anywhere else for that matter. Hopefully, a few others have realised this as an advantage as well.

However, there are a few things that I dislike about Google Browser Sync:

1. It adds a significant delay when launching Firefox since it needs to communicate with the server.  Obviously the length of the delay will depend on the speed of your internet connection and the amount of items that it needs to keep in sync.
2. You can’t choose a specific bookmark to keep in sync; either you let it synchronise all of them or none at all.
3. It only works on a single browser session at a time.  Meaning if you launch a different Firefox browser session on the same computer or on work on two computers side-by-side, the syncronisation will not work on all of them at the same time.  If you do this, the extension will only be active on the last browser you launched. However, you can reactivate it simply reconnecting with a single-click.
4. It enables cookies, saved passwords and browser history synchronisations by default which is a big security risk (which Google will warns you about upon downloading the extension, installing it and also stated on their [3] FAQ).  I would have liked these to be disabled by default which force the users to be more aware of the risks.

Apparently Google is currently working on all the issues stated above and hope to sort them out in a future release of this wonderful and very handy extension.

So. Got Firefox? Got Gmail? What are you waiting for?

Get [4] Google Browser Sync here now.

Now, if only Google made a similar extension for [5] Apple Safari…