Google Chrome to sync with Google accounts

Google's Chrome browser will be getting Google account synchronization, a post from Google Engineer Tim Steele in the Chromium developer group revealed today.

"A bunch of us have been working on a feature to sync user data in Chromium with a Google account," Steele said. "We have built a library that implements the client side of our sync protocol as well as the Google server-side infrastructure to serve Google Chrome users and synchronize data to their Google Account."

The sync feature will be limited to bookmark data at first, but it will eventually grow to include other browser data, developer documents say. The result would be similar to the Firefox browser extension Google discontinued last year, which synced history, persistent cookies and passwords across different machines.

"To make this sync infrastructure scale to millions of users, we decided to leverage existing XMPP-based Google Talk servers to give us 'push' semantics, rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates," the FAQ says, "Using XMPP pushes, the sync servers don't need to waste cycles for no reason."

Steele continued, "We can't wait (*really*) to work on this with the rest of the Chromium community and going even further in creating the best browzr ever! "