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Google had retired its “Google Browser Sync for Firefox” long back. It was quite expected with the Chrome coming into the playing field. Google has been constantly updating its browser(at least the developer channel) which is gong to be the basis for its future operating system dreams.

The recent dev build (4.0.201.1) released, has bookmark synchronisation which syncs your browsers bookmarks to Google Docs (read Google Drive) and not Google Bookmarks as one would expect.

So do you want to try the new feature ? First join Google Chrome’s dev channel, which includes a buggier, feature loaded and less polished version of Google Chrome.

Start Chrome with the “–enable-sync” flag. You will find a option in the Tools menu called “Sync my bookmarks…”. Login into your Google Account and the process should start immediately.

The synced bookmarks are placed in Google Docs in “My Folders”.  This interface could be a precursor to GDrive which could act as online storage device.

Related articles

• Bookmarks Here, Bookmarks There, Bookmarks Everywhere
• Google Chrome: Now with Bookmark Syncing (for the Brave) (mashable.com)
• Race To Data Portability: Google Chrome vs. Mozilla Weave (readwriteweb.com)
• Google Chrome Adds Bookmark Sync Support (techie-buzz.com)
• Google Docs, Slowly Morphing into Google Drive (mt-soft.com.ar)
• And Google Said, Let There Be Chrome Bookmark Sync (techcrunch.com)
• Google Docs hints at GDrive… maybe (downloadsquad.com)
• How to Enable Bookmark Syncing in Chrome, Without an Add-on [Google Chrome] (lifehacker.com)

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

There was no “Download Day”, no server downtime, no record to set… It all happened without much fanfare. Just a small statement in the most visited page in internet. “New! Download Chrome (BETA) – the new browser from Google”

Google calls it Chrome, People call it “Google OS”, Open Source Community will have its “Chromium”, IE would call it “Nightmare come true”, Opera would cry “copy cat”, Apple would say “Just another Safari“, Privacy Advocates will cry “Foul”, Some call it start of “Web 3.0″ or “Web 3.0 beta”, FireFox is just recovering from the “shock” and I just call it “cool“…

Imagine the simplicity and minimalistic colours of Google in a browser and you got “Chrome”. The way you had imagined and used tabs are going to change. The tabs are going to the top floor instead of being below the address bar. You can still switch tabs! You can kill the tab from the tab strip or from the process manager. When you kill the tab, you see a “sad tab.” If you reload the page, Google Chrome will even remember the scroll position.

New tab page shows most frequently visited page, most frequent searches, bookmarks, and recently closed tabs. You can choose whether a bookmark strip follows you as you surf (in case you want to save screen space).

Geeks, use the Task Manager to get details about a specific process running in Google Chrome, or to force a misbehaving tab or application to close. You can use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Esc to quickly open the Task Manager. For each active item in Google Chrome, you can monitor the amount of memory taken up, the amount of CPU used, and the network activity (bytes sent and received). To force a misbehaving webpage or application to close in Google Chrome, select the web page, then click the End process button. For those who need to go the extra mile, you have “Stats for Nerds”

More news for the techies, Google Chrome uses WebKit, not a new rendering engine to the web. It renders just like Safari. It multi processes all its tabs with separate threads making it more stable and resource efficient in long run. Chrome uses V8 virtual machine to execute javascript. According to one source, “V8 executes JavaScript much much faster than current technologies.” Chrome is open under a BSD License. The name of the project to open-source Google Chrome is Chromium.

The official Google blog announced the Chrome project being available to general public from today. For now only Windows users. Mac and Linux users watch out for updates. You can also check out the comic book explaining Google Chrome from Google.

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The developers back at Micro$oft have suddenly woken up to privacy concerns of their customer and decided to introduce Private Browsing a.k.a Porn Mode, in the upcoming Internet Explorer 8.

The fancy name for this feature is “InPrivate”. When activated, InPrivate won’t store new cookies, but still allows existing cookies to be read. Additionally, new history entries, search queries, form data, passwords and temporary web files will be purged at the end of the internet session. It is basically a step forward from the IE7 tool ‘Delete Browsing History’, which didn’t allow data – such as cookies from often-visited websites – to be retained if the user wanted the option. According to Micro$oft’s IEBlog, the features related with privacy would be

• InPrivate Browsing: This lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data.
• Delete Browsing History: This helps you control your browsing history after you’ve visited Web sites.
• InPrivate Blocking: This informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it. InPrivate Blocking will also warn users of third-party content which gives others information about browsing habits without using cookies, and offer to prevent communication with this type of content.
• InPrivate Subscriptions: This feature allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of Web sites to block or allow.

So, if you are asking when you can get this amazing kinky feature, the next beta is expected in November by some sources…

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“No software is free from bugs” and that statement holds true for the mighty Firefox too. Yesterday the Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 3.0.1, the first update for Firefox 3.0, patching some of the known vulnerabilities. It mainly addresses several security and stability issues. A update was also released for Firefox 2.0 users upgrading them to 2.0.16.

The two critical patches deal with remote code vulnerabilities and command line URLs spawning tabs when Firefox is not running. MFSA 2008-34 is the first critical patch. It was reported via TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative, and centers on issues with Mozilla’s internal CSSValue array data structure. An attacker can create a large number of calls to common CSS objects, triggering a crash of the browser when it attempts to free the CSS object while still in use. The resulting crash could be used to execute code on the system.

The second critical issue comes from Billy Rios, who reported that, “if Firefox is not already running, passing it a command-line URI with pipe (“|”) symbols will open multiple tabs. This URI splitting could be used to launch chrome:i URIs from the command-line, a partial bypass of the fix for MFSA 2005-53 which was intended to block external applications from loading such URIsi,” Mozilla explains. The vulnerability in MFSA 2005-53 remains patched however.

“For example, web browsers normally handle file: URIs themselves, or block them from web content altogether, but this flaw enabled attackers to pass them from another browser into Firefox. In Firefox 2 scripts running from file: URIs can read data from a user’s entire disk, a risk if the attacker could first place a malicious file in a guessable location on the local disk. Rios demonstrated that the so-called “Safari Carpet-bombing vulnerability” could be used for this, as well as other techniques that do not rely on that now-fixed Safari vulnerability,” the advisory added.

Internal testing on Firefox 3.0 also showed that Rios’ research can be combined with various vulnerabilities to trigger code execution. “In Firefox 3 scripts running in local files have limited access to other files, almost entirely mitigating the file: attack. However, combined with a vulnerability which allows an attacker to inject script into a chrome document the above issue could be used to run arbitrary code on a victim’s computer.”

Firefox 3.0.1 Updated

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