Google has issued the start developer preview version of its Chrome browser to reach the version 4.x milestone, a phase that should bring some avant-garde features in the forthcoming HTML 5 specification for web pages just that for now but sports a deject-based bookmark synchronisation tool.

Google'southward Chrome browser is getting a bookmark sync tool.
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"Once you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will then upload and store your bookmarks in your Google Business relationship. Anytime you add together or alter a bookmark, your changes will exist sent to the cloud and immediately broadcast to all other computers for which you've activated bookmark sync," programmer Tim Steele said in a blog post on Monday. Steele introduced the Chrome bookmark feature less than 3 weeks agone.

I set up the bookmarks feature with no trouble on version 4.0.201.1 of Chrome for Windows; note that to get it to piece of work, yous must specifically enable it at launch past calculation the "–enable-sync" option to the launch command. The wrench menu (think tools) offers the new card item to synchronise bookmarks. Clicking on information technology springs open up a dialog box that prompts you to log in with a Google account; doing and so then sends the bookmarks to the server.

The Mac version of Chrome — which by the manner now enables by default plug-ins such equally Adobe Systems' Flash and has grown much more stable — didn't yet back up bookmark sync on Monday dark, and then I couldn't test the actual synchronisation itself on my present abode fix-up.

Google doesn't draw much attention to version numbers, using them more than as developer placeholders than beacons for marketing or support purposes. Google updates Chrome automatically, so users often go new versions without even knowing near it. Only the new versions can signal when the company is making significant changes behind the scenes.

Clearly absent thus far from the bookmark sync feature is whatever machinery to synchronise with Google Bookmarks, the visitor's cloud-based bookmark service that can be used through the Google Toolbar or the website itself. Google has said it's focusing on the basics first with Chrome.

It's intriguing when Google adds new cloud-based services, given its interest in moving people away from dependence on individual PCs and toward net-based services hosted on central servers. In that same vein, Google is working on several other features that expand what the web can do via an upcoming version of its underlying language, HTML 5.

Among the HTML v features gear up for Chrome 4.x are Web Workers, which permit the browser perform background processing tasks without interrupting a web application's user interface, and local storage, which helps a web awarding work even when a computer is disconnected from the network. Some other HTML 5 applied science, congenital-in video and sound that doesn't require a plug-in such every bit Wink, began arriving in Chrome version 3.

HTML 5 is very much in flux, though. Microsoft, maker of the ascendant browser, has only recently joined the HTML 5 discussion in earnest. And concluding week, Google's Aaron Boodman raised a broader issue, questioning the merit of labelling many new HTML features equally version 5.

"I would like to suggest that nosotros become rid of the concepts of 'versions' birthday from HTML. In reality, nobody supports all of HTML 5," Boodman said in a message to an HTML 5 mailing list. "Instead of insisting that a detail version of HTML is a monolithic unit that must be implemented in its entirety, we could take each feature (or logical group of features) spun off into its own small spec. Nosotros're already doing this a bit with things like Web Workers, but I don't run across why we don't only practice it for everything."

Version four of Chrome likewise is slated to go a top-requested feature, the power to recognise when web pages offer an RSS or Atom feeds and to subscribe to them with a service such as Google Reader.

–Posted past Stephen Shankland