Sync

[timoreimann]

Syncing stored sessions to the cloud for multi-machine availability has been mentioned numerous times as a desirable feature in the extension comments. For the sake of documentation, I will hereby create an issue for it.

According to Nick, however, the problem with this request is that synchronization introduces a variety of problems which are non-trivial to resolve. For example, what is the expected synchronization result when multiple, synchronized Chrome instances share a session with the same name?

Since any reasonable synchronization implementation will likely increase complexity and sacrifice part of SWS's simplicity, this issue will be treated with low priority.

[timoreimann]

Since version 20, Chrome provides a synchronization API called storage.sync which should deal with the majority of problems and inherent complexity of the issue in general. It makes sense to rely on Google's expertise in the field and bind the API when time to implement this feature comes.

Here's the URL to the API docs: http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage.html

[nickbaum]

From an email update to Timo: I worked actually on substantial change implementing bookmark-based sync this fall, but just couldn't get it to work reliably. The chrome sync API does make things somewhat easier, but there are still many challenges, both technical (the sync API is throttled) and design-wise. A stop-gap might be to have sync act more as a backup than a real-time sync. This would be substantially easier to implement, though not as good a user experience. For now sync will have to stay on the back burner a bit longer, but I'll keep thinking about it.

[timoreimann]

It definitely seems like a non-trivial task, which is why I think we should try to collect all possible thoughts, design ideas, and challenges we may face in the process. Since the issue tracker IMHO lacks the capabilities to provide the necessary structure for that, I believe that we should open up a wiki page for this purpose. I'd be more than willing to give it a starter but I'm afraid non-collaborators won't be able to do that for privilege reasons.

Nick, you mentioned that you've already invested a substantial amount of time to a bookmark-based approach. Do you think part of that effort could be reused for an approach that takes advantage of the storage API? I'd also be interested to know about any problems you've ran into (and possibly solved) already that we'd need to tackle.

My very personal feature request would be to allow selective synchronization of individual windows as I often need to share some (but never all) windows among my personal and work Chrome instances. This seems like a somewhat advanced capability already, however, so the simpler base requirement could be to allow people to sync all of their windows. And while a sync-is-for-backups kind of approach may not provide the perfect UX yet, it'd already solve the problem of losing all SWS-saved windows when setting up a new Chrome installation on a different machine.

[trusktr]

I hope this gets implemented. it'd be a nice feature.