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Google Nov. 2 rolled out a beta of Chrome 4.0 with the much-requested bookmark sync tool to enable Chrome’s 30 million-plus users to keep their favorite Web pages up to date across multiple computing devices.
The idea is fairly obvious these days; most users have computers they use at home and computers they use at work. But workers don’t always — or can’t — take their work machines home.
However, users want to access the same bookmarks at home that they would normally tap into at work without manually adding their bookmarks every time they use a different computer. Bookmark sync is a natural solution for this quandary.
Bookmark sync appeared in the Chrome for the developer build in August, but the average user doesn’t subscribe to that channel. Now any Chrome users can use the feature with minimal effort.
To activate it and get the bookmarks synced in seconds, users need to click the wrench menu on the right of the Chrome browser tab, select “Synchronize my bookmarks” and sign in with their Google account identification. The bookmarks will be uploaded. As users do this to multiple devices, Chrome will ask users if they want to merge bookmarks.
To see this action, check out this video demo. Google also claims it boosted performance scores on Chrome by 30 percent since its current stable release, according to Mozilla’s Dromeao DOM Core tests.
Speed is a big deal for Chrome and Google’s forthcoming Chrome Operating System, which will be the Linux-based launching platform for the Chrome browser and Web applications. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has praised Chrome OS for its speed versus other OS’.
Google Chrome team members had other reasons to celebrate their progress with the browser, which launch in September 2008. Google Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recently gave the Chrome team a multi-million-dollar stock bonus for creating Chrome.
The money was awarded as part of a Founders Award, which celebrates the “kind of large-scale, game-changing achievements that Google stands for,” wrote Alan Eustace, senior vice president, engineering and research at Google. Google’s Gmail, AdSense for Content, Google Maps and some sales and marketing units have won this award. Eustace then switched to recruiting mode, adding:
““We want to continue to create products that rethink industry standards, challenge the status quo and make people’s lives easier – and we know that there are great minds out there with the same goal. Recently, we announced that we’re starting to ramp up hiring for positions across the company, continuing our investment in the future as we imagine it. That future is shaped by small teams of creative people who want to make a difference. We’re on the hunt for these kind of people – let us know if you think you’re one of them.”“
The Founders Award comes in the wake of Brin’s recent revelation that he was displeased that the Chrome team has not yet created a stable build for Chrome running on Macintosh machines.