Google Kills The Browser Sync Plugin With Firefox3
I have previously written, that I wanted a Google Browser Sync like plugin, just for Thunderbird. Now, it seems like I won’t have the GBS plugin in firefox anymore either. This is really sad.
I saw the sad news over at the google operating system blog, which tells me, that google is going to discontinue the development of the Google Browser Sync plugin. The reason being, that the people of the project at google have other things to do now. Sad! Mostly because I use it, and with pleasure. And they cannot just release the code, because a big part of the service was the storage of the data on google servers. One thing is, that the development is discontinued, another thing is, that there will be no firefox3 version, which basically kills the plugin overnight very soon.
I guess the game is lost. There is one last chance though. Max Rathbone has started a petition, to help people tell google, that they want a firefox3 version. Go sign the petition. I just did.
If the petition to google fails, I hope Weave will succed in delivering as good a service as GBS did. You can see some of the new cool stuff here, which includes sync’ing of bookmarks, cookies, browser history, passwords, tabs and form data. But where will Weave store the data?
Hey Per, Jup really SAD killing that plugin. I have been using for several years now. Of cause they are doing it so they can promote their own “Foxmarks” Bookmark Synchronizer. But what is more sad, is that an update of the google sync _could_ be cool if it was updated to use the XMPP structured stanzas for exchanging bookmarks (defined by a XEP-0048 i think). In this way everybody could exchange and merge bookmarks in a standardized way. You could even get it from your own Gtalk/XMPP stash if you wanted to make a shortcut. Even Safari and other browsers could use it. But anyway, we can not prevent vendors to invent their own standards, sadly enough!
-Well just my 50 cent.. See ya tomorrow!
June 19th, 2008 at 19:57Hey Again.. Sorry Per, I did not see that you already had commented Weave. But a lot of the component is made from the XMPP standard, and in this way Google is already involved. Thats is probably why they also discontinued their sync project.
June 26th, 2008 at 10:04Just an update: http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/07/10/0337211.shtml.
July 10th, 2008 at 18:17Google have open sourced the code, so development will continue.The code for browser sync is now available on code.google.com. Cool… Even though I hope for weave in the long run.
Great thing, though I do hope for weave too now. Even though they have open sourced the code, a big part of the service was the storage on their servers.
July 10th, 2008 at 19:15