Many users have been saying they will wait to switch to Google Chrome until it supports add-ons like Firefox does. That may not be necessary any more as Google unveiled its first add-on like feature.

With people switching between computers on a regular basis (work computer, home computer, travelling, laptop, etc), bookmark synchronization has become a pretty important feature for Web browsing.  Firefox has a fantastic add-on called Xmarks that will sync bookmarks between Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari (Mac only), and that isn’t to mention the long-in-development Mozilla Weave that will even sync to mobile phones.  While all of that has been nice, there has been nothing for Google Chrome up to this point, but it looks like Google is about to change all of that fairly quickly.

Ars Technica is reporting on a message from the Chromium development board that a synchronization feature will arrive in the open source project this week, and in a dev channel release of the browser sometime this month.  The translation of all this for the non-development readers is that developers will be playing with it soon, but your average user will have to wait a little while.

The architecture for the update is a bit different than any other solution currently out there on the market.  First off, this will be included in the core code of the browser, meaning it’s a native feature and not something users will have to add on to the browser.  Secondly, it will sync with a Google account meaning that not only will you have access to the data inside your browser, but from anywhere that you log in to your Google account.

At this time it will only be syncing your bookmarks, but there are plans to add more functionality later on.  While the exact nature of the data that could be added later wasn’t revealed, it isn’t hard to imagine it may be things such as browsing history and passwords.

This may be a major tipping point for the browser as many Firefox users have said that they would wait to switch to Chrome until it had the ability for add-ons.  If Google plans to put features like this in the core code, there may be no need for add-ons at all.

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Entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 3:11 pm under Google.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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