Chrome to get cloud-based bookmark sync

The boffins behind Google’s Chrome browser are plotting to introduce automatic cloud-based bookmark synchronisation, with other features such as site-specific passwords to follow.

A user’s Google account will act as the data store for the bookmark list, with a live connection between the browser and Google account ensuring changes to the browser’s set of bookmarked sites are ‘pushed’ to the account and then echoed out to other Chrome browsers when they log into the same account.

In a posting on the mailing list for Chrome’s parent open-source Chromium project, Google employee and Chrome developer Tim Steele said “A bunch of us have been working on a feature to sync user data in Chromium with a Google account. The great news is that we’ll be starting to work directly in the Chromium project this week.”

“We have built a library that implements the client side of our sync protocol, as well as the Google server-side infrastructure to serve Google Chrome users and synchronise data to their Google Account.”

“Rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates, when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync.”

In a follow-up post, Steele’s fellow Chrome code-cutter Idan Avraham said that the sync traffic itself would be sent using HTTPS “so that any sensitive information stored in bookmarks is protected when sent over the wire.”

Other potential targets for cloud-based Chrome storage would include site passwords and history lists.

“We are aware of the fact that passwords and other browser data types is something we’ll need to think about at some point” Avraham admits. “We wanted to focus on bookmarks and get it right first before we think about other data types. We chose bookmarks both because they are generally the most important to users, but also because they are the hardest data type to sync since we have to sync an entire hierarchy of folders/bookmarks”.

However, the system will use a different approach to that of the Google Bookmarks service, which relies on a browser’s Google Toolbar.

“Chrome’s different data model, among other things, make it a lot like the ‘square peg in a round hole’ problem” Steele explains. “For the first release, we’ve just focused on getting sync to work between Chrome instances.”