No Google Browser sync for Firefox 3 – ever
Check update at bottom of this post – Easy fix for Google Notebook Firefox extension not working in later browsers.
This is irritating although not catastrophic
Thanks for trying out Google Browser Sync and for all of your feedback. It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.
This is a surprise, I’ve just got used to GBS (Google Browser Sync) doing its thing behind the scenes and have come to take for granted the fact that the browsers on all three of my computers would look the same and have the same bookmarks.
Judging by the comments there are free products that have most of the functionality but none that sync passwords- this will be the real pain. I will be loading the Firefox extension Foxmarks later on today, from what I can gather they store bookmarks on the web and most people seem to like the service. The bookmarks on the web thing does feel a bit retro though. I liked the fact that GBS worked in the background and was very unobtrusive.
This commenter (on the original article) raises an obvious point:
Reply by EmailCall me Captain Obvious, but why don’t they just open-source the thing and let the OSS community take it and run with it? That way, they don’t have to do any more work and those people who value the extension will be able to still use it. Like one of the previous posters said, GBS did password syncing, which I found valuable. Excluding some bookmarks was also nice.
The discontinuation of GBS may not be critical but it got me thinking about just how much of my computer based stuff is tied up with Google and that if they pulled the plug on some of these other services I would be, well screwed is the politest term that comes to mind:
I have two years of work on Google Notes and if that were to go the way of GBS I would be in trouble – I have literally thousands of notes in maybe 50 or so notebooks from a period (I think) of over 3 years. There is no way that I could copy and paste all of these into something else.
I am going to have to think on this a little.
