I’ve been using Google Browser Sync for Firefox for about the last week — and, this morning, uninstalled it.
I do like having something that captures the tabs I have open at any given time. That means I can shut down my browser session (at night, or at the end of the workday), and have those windows pop back up when I start the machine again. Handy, sometimes to an extreme, as I’d find myself with fifty or more tabs reloading …
I’d been using the SessionSaver extension, which did a fine enough job, but when I read about the Google tool — well, heck, I had to try it.
There were three major differences between the two tools, though only the third affected my decision.
- Google saves the session info (tabs, cookies, browser settings, passwords, etc.) online. You can specify which data items to include (or not to), so if you’re security-conscious and paranoid, you can keep the upload to a minimium. SessionSaver, of course, saves the info on your machine. (That gets to the heart of the different underlying purposes of the two, but I’ll get to that below).
- SessionSaver caches the tab sessions. When I fire up FF again, it brings those older, cached versions back. Google just saves the URLs, and therefore refreshes the pages on reentry. Each has its advantages at different times.
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SessionSaver is highly reliable. Only once, when I had a page open that was crashing FF, did I run into problems with it (and you can get around that by prompting SS to ask before reloading the tabs). If, for some reason, the right tab set doesn’t reload (if it gets confused by multiple FF windows, for example), you can manually tell it which saved session to reload. Google’s reliability is … sketchy. Sometimes it just simply didn’t reload the tabs. For example, last night,
I closed down FF — and realized I’d left an image properties window open. I closed that — but Google tried to remember that as what was open, and didn’t open any of my tabs when I started this morning. And Google has no saved sessions or way to get back to where I was.
To be fair, Google’s purpose isn’t specifically to restore a single machine’s state, but to sync up browser settings. If I had, for example, a PC at work and one at home, I could use the tool to keep both of them with the same settings, bookmarks, passwords, and, yes, if it worked, tabs. That’s something that SessionSaver doesn’t do. On the other hand, SS does exactly what I’m looking for: remembers what tabs I had open last session.
Firefox 2 is supposed to have that capability, as well, which will be great (and makes a lot of sense). Until then, I’ll stick with SessionSaver.