From the ‘Zero to Four Versions in a Year’ files:
Google is now out with Chrome 4.0.201.1, introducing browser bookmark syncing, kinda/sorta.
No that’s not a typo in the version number either. This is Google Chrome 4, in its dev-channel release format. So for those of you keeping score at home, Google has gone from a pre 1.0 release of Chrome in September of 2008, to Chrome version 4 in less than a year.
I’m not sure if this is a race by Google to try and be at Google Chrome version 9 before Microsoft releases IE 9, but it sure seems that way to me.
Enough about the numbering scheme, Chrome 4 marks the debut of Google’s bookmark synchronization feature, albeit in a very limited way. Simply clicking your Chrome app shortcut (on Windows) to start Chrome 4 will not give you a version of Chrome 4 that will actually start with the bookmark synchronization feature (that would be too easy). Instead, users must start Chrome at the command line, with the flag –enable-sync to get the sync option.
The actual synchronization capability at this early stage isn’t particularly impressive. In my own limited test on Windows XP SP3 test box (sync isn’t avail on Linux versions yet as far as I could tell), the sync actually failed to sync up my bookmarks.