Google Browser Sync

» see google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

By 2006 I had TTNet broadband at home and I was also using machines that were not mine, which was the ordinary condition of a university student in Ankara at the time. Your bookmarks lived on whichever computer you happened to be sitting at. There was no expectation that they would follow you, and the workaround everyone had was to email yourself a link, or keep the important addresses in your head, or just retype them.

Google Browser Sync was the first serious attempt to make that stop being a problem. It came out of Google Labs on 8 June 2006 as a free Firefox extension, and it synchronized more than the obvious things. Bookmarks, yes, but also cookies, saved passwords, browsing history, and the set of tabs and windows you had open when you closed the browser. You could sit down at another machine, open Firefox, and get your session back rather than your bookmark folder.

The tab restoration is the part that still reads as ambitious. Bookmark syncing was already a category with several products in it. Handing you the state of a browser you had shut down on another continent was a different proposition, and it is the one that browsers eventually standardized on.

It was killed on 13 June 2008 by an announcement rather than by an outage. Google said the team had moved to other work, would not be updating the extension for Firefox 3, and would keep the servers up through the end of the year for Firefox 2 users. Firefox 3 shipped four days later.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pin ~

The security design deserves a note because it was better than the era required. Your data could be encrypted with an alphanumeric PIN that you held and Google did not, which meant that in principle Google could store your browsing history and passwords without being able to read either. Passwords and cookies were always encrypted, PIN or not.

In 2006 the standard arrangement was that you handed a service your data in the clear and trusted the privacy policy. A Google product shipping with client-side encryption and telling you that this put the contents beyond Google's own reach was not the normal shape of the deal. It is also why there was no export tool at the end. Nobody at Google could produce a readable copy of what you had stored, which is the correct behavior working out to an inconvenient conclusion.

~ the postmortem ~

The official language was that the team had moved on to other projects that were keeping them busy, and later that Google preferred to focus on Toolbar and Gears as the things that extended browsers across the board. Both statements are true and neither is the reason.

The reason is that in 2006 Google needed a way to make Firefox stickier and by 2008 it was eleven weeks away from shipping its own browser. Chrome launched on 2 September 2008 with sync built into it rather than bolted on. Browser Sync was an extension for a browser Google did not control, staffed by a small team, sitting on a capability the company had decided was a core feature of the product it was about to release. It did not get ported. It got absorbed.

~ the inheritance ~

Everything Browser Sync did is now a checkbox in the setup flow of every browser shipped. Firefox got Weave in 2007 and Firefox Sync properly in 2010, Chrome had it from launch, and the encryption argument that Browser Sync settled with a PIN is the same argument every vendor now settles with a passphrase.

Xmarks lived a longer version of the same life, running as a bookmark sync service from 2006 until 2018 and getting killed by the same logic in the end. There is no market for a feature once the platform decides the feature belongs to it.

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