About a month ago, I noted the bad news that Google was ending development of one of the most useful Firefox add-ons ever, the Google browser sync extension. This nifty piece of code not only kept your bookmarks synced between different computers (across different operating systems, too) but also coordinated browsing history, cookies and passwords. Foxmarks, which I switched over to, only supports syncing bookmarks, so far. And the Mozilla’s Weave project is still in an early beta stage. So it’s nice to hear on the official Google open source blog today (via Jeremy Zawodny’s link blog) that the company is throwing open the doors to programmers everywhere and anywhere to keep Google browser sync alive:
“Open Sourcing the Google Browser Sync client was something we’d always planned to do, and we’re pleased to say that the code for it is now yours for the taking. Given our recent decision to discontinue support for Browser Sync, we wanted to make sure that the code for it was available for the developer community to use and improve. While we’re no longer doing active development, we’ve released the code in the hopes that those folks who asked for it will use it to develop something cool. For example, it would be great to see the server ported to Google App Engine, or support for Firefox 3 implemented.”
Now we have some competition, I suppose, between privately-coded Foxmarks and open-sourced Weave and Google browser sync. That should lead to good progress in a hurry — I hope.
p.s. Exciting to make an allusion to the great flick “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” “Life of Bryan” in my headline. Here’s the clip:
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