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Google Chrome 4 debuts with bookmark sync

By Sean Michael Kerner on August 18, 2009 2:59 PM

From the 'Zero to Four Versions in a Year' files:

Google is now out with Chrome 4.0.201.1, introducing browser bookmark syncing, kinda/sorta.

No that's not a typo in the version number either. This is Google Chrome 4, in its dev-channel release format. So for those of you keeping score at home, Google has gone from a pre 1.0 release of Chrome in September of 2008, to Chrome version 4 in less than a year.

I'm not sure if this is a race by Google to try and be at Google Chrome version 9 before Microsoft releases IE 9, but it sure seems that way to me.

Enough about the numbering scheme, Chrome 4 marks the debut of Google's bookmark synchronization feature, albeit in a very limited way. Simply clicking your Chrome app shortcut (on Windows) to start Chrome 4 will not give you a version of Chrome 4 that will actually start with the bookmark synchronization feature (that would be too easy). Instead, users must start Chrome at the command line, with the flag --enable-sync to get the sync option.

The actual synchronization capability at this early stage isn't particularly impressive. In my own limited test on Windows XP SP3 test box (sync isn't avail on Linux versions yet as far as I could tell), the sync actually failed to sync up my bookmarks.

The way that the sync feature currently works is it publishes a list of a Chrome users bookmarks to their Google Account inside of Google Docs. That's right, no seperate Google Bookmarks feature for Chrome yet. It's just a Docs doc.

Here's a screenshot from my test case (showing the sync'ed bookmarks folder inside of Google Docs). The sync failed to include any of the bookmarks (of which i had 6) from my bookmarks bar in the sync, even though I had enabled the feature in my Chrome 4 browser.

My own issues with the current dev-channel state of browser sync aside - this is a huge feature for the future of Chrome the browser, and Chrome OS too.

Sync built into the browser means the browser becomes a part of the cloud, not just an on-ramp to the Internet. Simply syncing bookmarks online is not the killer app for Chrome, but full browser integration with Google services could be as the platform grows and matures.

From a competitive point of view, Mozilla has been working on its online syncing feature called 'Weave' for a couple of years, and it's not directly integrated as a feature into any current release of Firefox, though it is available as an add-on.

When I spoke with Mozilla about Weave earlier this year, Dan Mills, Mozilla Weave lead told InternetNews.com that Weave has had over 30,000 downloads, and around 6,000 to 7,000 daily users.

With Chrome 4 hitting dev this week including sync, and a likely Chrome 4 beta release within the next two to 4 weeks, I'd expect that Chrome sync will surpass Mozilla Weave in terms of users by the end of September.

Make no mistake about it, sync is a critical feature for Google Chrome, and that's at least one key reason why they're now calling the new release version 4

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