Google Chrome 4 Beta Debuts Chrome 4 Beta Released with Bookmark Syncing Feature Sean Michael Kerner
From the 'Delicious Feature' files:
Google's Chrome 4 Web browser is now in Beta. Chrome 4 has been in the dev-channel cycle since August and has one key differentiating feature over its predecessors in the Chrome 3 browser series – bookmark syncing.
Google has three main releases for Chrome: dev, beta and stable channel. The move into the beta channel for Chrome 4 means it's getting ready for prime time.
Back in August, I had some issue with the bookmarking syncing feature, which wasn't really well integrated with either Google's online services or with Chrome itself. That was months ago, and Google has since improved the whole process.
"Once you've activated Google Chrome bookmark sync on each of your computers, any changes you make to your bookmarks will appear on all synced computers in just a few seconds," Google engineers wrote in a recent blog post.
The synchronization leverages Google's XMPP (that's the same protocol used by Jabber and Google Talk) assets to synchronize bookmarks.
While having browser sync is not a new idea — delicious has been doing it for years and there have multiple add-on efforts for Firefox to include synchronization — Google's approach is a little different.
Google is directly integrating the sync into the browser and leveraging the power of the Google cloud to do it. This narrows the gap between desktop and cloud computing and brings Chrome into the Google online services fold.
Browser sync also give us a very early preview of what Google has in store from Chrome OS, it's netbook operating system. Chrome OS is of course based on the Chrome browser and I can see Google
leveraging the same kind of sync XMPP engine on the desktop to sync and back up a whole lot more than just user's bookmarks.
