Firefox Add-ons: Google Browser Sync

This document only applies to Firefox 2.
Google has announced that they will not be continuing support for this project and will not be releasing a Firefox 3 compatible version.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions.

If you have limited your search for add-ons for Firefox to the official Firefox sit at https://addons.mozilla.org you are missing out on some cool stuff. I make a point of checking out the Google Labs site every month or so to see what those smart folks at Google are up to. I tend to avoid beta or experimental software unless it is designed to address a real need that I have or unless its just really really cool.

Over the last few months I have added a third and then a fourth computer to my list of often used PCs. I have my main PC at home, my main PC at work, a work owned laptop, and I use one of the laptops we have around the house. I do a lot of work on the web and mail servers at the office at all hours of the day or night and I need to be able to do those things quickly and easily no matter which machine I am using. My biggest problem involved keeping my bookmarks synchronized along at LEAST my home and work PC’s. Keeping the laptops synced was less important but still a hassle.

I tried a few different add-ons that I found through the Mozilla site. They all had problems. I had given up and was using a bash script to just copy my bookmarks.html file up to a website nightly. I would then download it to another machine, blow away all my bookmarks, and then import the latest version. It was not a horrible hardship since with practice, this can be done in under two minutes. The biggest problem I had was remembering which machine I had added the new link to and often I would need a link now and stopping to do a new import would destroy my chain of thought.

Google Labs has come to the rescue. If you have a Google account and more than one PC, I highly recommend the Google Browser Sync to keep your bookmarks, passwords, and cookies synchronized between both machines. Google has put together a fairly extensive FAQ for the Browser Sync component.

This tool will let you use Google as a encrypted storage location for your Firefox bookmarks, history, cookies, and stored passwords. It’s such a wonderful thing to browse to a website at home that I logged into at work and find myself still logged in. As Google points out, even if you only have one PC, this tool is an excellent way to make sure that your bookmarks are always backed up. Like most Firefox Add-ons, this tool works with Firefox 1.5 and newer regardless of your platform so you can use this to synchronize between a Windows and Linux system or Linux and Apple, or Windows and Apple.

While the extension runs beautifully once its up and running, I have a few tips that will help anyone who plans to use this on more than one PC. My first attempt resulted in a huge mess in terms of my bookmark organization. I had named some bookmark folders and bookmarks with slightly different names on various PCs. The Google Browser Sync tool synced everything so I I had a lot of duplicates. I uninstalled it, and did a little reorganizing, and started over and it’s been peachy ever sense.