> But what is the user facing benefit?

Syncing bookmarks, recently opened tabs, passwords, autofill(?). These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Whether they're worth the cost of data mining is another matter of course.

    These are genuine benefits when you're working
    with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets.

I work with all of these devices. Yet I don't want any of that syncing.

The thought that Google wants to send my 'recently opened tabs' to their servers makes me shudder. So they get the whole browsing history of every one of their users? Of all the pages that have nothing to do with them?

Same with passwords. So they have a gigantic database with all of their users passwords for all the services the users use? Even those totally unrelated to Google?

> I work with all of these devices. Yet I don't want any of that syncing.

So... you're happy that they're giving you the option to turn it off then, right? I mean, you appear to concede that someone users want this. You want the option to turn if off, which you're getting. That seems like good news.

Except your tone doesn't seem to match your logic.

FWIW: I use Firefox too. But... I mean come on folks. They messed up, they're fixing it. The obsession with hatred and flamage is getting a little out of control.

The issue is that trust breaches can't just be rolled back. You put people in a situation where they don't want to get caught out by the next change that the press doesn't pick up and/or you don't hear about.

It's possible that I want my passwords (of other sites) synced on all instances of Chrome across my devices, but I don't want Google to know these passwords (obviously). They have an "encrypt-passwords" feature for that.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139

Perhaps you have never visited passwords.google.com :-)

The link says:

> Passphrases are optional. Your synced data is always protected by encryption when it's in transit.

Data is protected when in transit and passphrase is optional. How is this a good feature?

The difference is whether or not Google can see your passwords.

When you use a passphrase, your data will presumably be encrypted with your passphrase and thus only be visible to you with knowledge of the passphrase. Not even Google could see the data while it would be stored on their servers.

Encryption during transit means that no bad actors like hackers, unscrupulous ISP's or overzealous governments can access your data _while_ it travels over the wires towards Google's servers but Google can still do what it wants with your data.

My question is why is that not on by default? Why would it ever be acceptable for Google to have unencrypted copies of your bank password for example?

I would assume it's the standard tradeoff - if you lose the key to the password DB (be it an actual cryptographic key or a password you synthesize it from), you lose access to the data, and some people are more interested in guaranteeing access to their data over avoiding storing it with an external entity.

(I work for Google but on nothing remotely related to this.)

One advantage that wasn't mentioned is the ability to send a tab between devices.

I'm looking at something on my desktop, have to go somewhere, so I just send the tabs to my phone and continue consuming. If I forget to do so, I can also use the url bar to search through common history, so that I could enter a few words from the title and go back to that article.

That being said, I personally wouldn't trust Google to do this, so I use Firefox that I believe encrypts data client-side by default.

Your use of the word "consuming" definitely solidified the idea that I'm all set without these features, I don't miss them that much.

> The thought that Google wants to send my 'recently opened tabs' to their servers makes me shudder. So they get the whole browsing history of every one of their users?

They claim sync data is end-to-end encrypted. However they would already have your browsing history if you have address bar suggestions enabled.

Chrome is not really a web browser, it is a part of the Google crawling machine.

Distributed, and it pays for itself using AdSense.

What if other people do want it?

Beware the The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

Hilariously, that WOT doesn't address my point.

Here's one way: there's not a singular axis that users wanting sync and users not wanting sync can be placed on and compared.

The other poster expressed how the feature sucked for their purposes. But the feature wasn't made to punish them, it was made after evaluating the preferences of many users, which is what my question is getting at.

Features can introduce risks in various ways. I discovered this long ago through a software vendor's annual feature request solicitation, in which I learned to be ware of what others ask for: you may get it.

Specifically as to sync: I would love to be able to sync certain elements of browser state between my systems.

Not between one of my systems, some arbitrary third party of questionable trust and intentions, and another of my systems. But directly between my systems.

Google actively thwart this.

A feature of most early browsers was the ability to save bookmarks to a file, and import that elsewhere. By slight extension, a browser session or tab state can be saved, either directly, or as bookmarks.

Chrome does not do this, either at all, or on all platforms. It's most resistant to this on the consumption-only platform of Android.

This has been a major point of frustration to me for a year and a half as I've been wanting to dump user state from one system to another, without Google intermediating that exchange for me. I've found no means of accomplishing this.

That is one element of the tyranny of the minimum viable user, as well as of Google cattle-prodding its users into the feed chutes.

They already have most of your browsing history simply by having you logged into your Gmail and browsing the sites having Google Analytics installed (which is most of the sites on the internet these days).

Some of us don't use the gmail web interface (opting for IMAP or a different provider instead), and use an ad blocker to take of analytics.

I do the same but sometimes I get email from google telling that I should disable access to those unsafe apps.

Ironically, from the article itself, this automatic sign in will not turn sync on automatically. This is probably the most confusing decision that can be.

There is, or at least was, a notable feature that synced data can be encrypted with a separate password, client-side. I can't vouch for its strength, but it's there.

While I understand and agree that they're benefits for the user, its interpretation and decision shall be made by the users themselves.

If the company supplying these features are forcefully making these decisions on behalf of me, I can assume that there are other intentions and motivations for providing these services to me for "free".

That "Save this login" stuff in Chrome drives me up the wall. I understand you can disable it under Settings (and I do) but I see it on other people's computer too and I feel a bit of me die inside when they click "Save login" just to make it go away.

Completely agree. It's ironic that users who click "remember my password" are 10x more likely to forget their password.

The next step in this equation is even more frustrating - people who's default workflow to signing in is to click 'I forgot my password', and proceed through those steps to instil a new password. And then the cycle continues.

> It's ironic that users who click "remember my password" are 10x more likely to forget their password.

How is that ironic? People who can't remember their password would have the most reason to let an external apparatus save it for them.

People who can't remember their password often forget it due to having used that feature. Forcing yourself to type a password in over and over will pretty quickly encode it into muscle memory.

This is a little ridiculous. Do you think there is no value in password managers? It's almost certainly better to have many complex passwords managed for you and only one strong password to protect them all, than to remember the same few passwords used across many accounts, decreasing the overall security of those accounts.

I understand healthy skepticism of Google, but essentially claiming password managers (which is what this feature is) are bad, for the sake of criticizing Google, is bad.

I think you've misunderstood me. I'm not criticising Google here. I just dislike any tool that encourages people to unintentionally forget passwords for the sake of "getting this annoying prompt out of my way". This can be a "remember me" on a website's own page, or a browser feature.

A good password manager is a great tool and more secure than a few simple memorable passwords. But when I use it, I'm making a conscious trade-off between memorable passwords and secure ones, but usually I'll at least need to memorise a master.

I'm fact just thinking about it - if Chrome's signin affinity is turned on, and I have chosen "remember me", AND I use the password manager, isn't that effectively equivalent to having your entire password manager with a "remember me"?

Out of the total population of the chrome users, how many really use more than 1 computer? These benefits may apply only for few users, probably in single percentage figures, which does not justify pushing it down the throats of everyone.

It’s pretty common for people to have a “work” computer and a “home” computer.

And also most of android population use chrome.

And that's probably one of the situations where you would precisely _not_ want synchronization. Now not only Google but your employer has access to your complete browsing history!

And exceptionally useful to put an unbreachable firewall between work and personal devices.

I think the majority of cases where it's helpful is between some traditional computing device, such as a laptop or desktop, and a mobile device such as a smart phone or small tablet. I think that's actually a fairly large amount of people.

That's also one of the situations it's most useful in, as having your saved passwords already present on your phone when you try to log into a site you generally don't from your phone is extremely helpful.

Well, most people. I use it to sync between laptop, tablet and smartphone.

IMO syncing the state of your user account between devices is the responsibility of the OS, not the browser.

Well unfortunately Microsoft and Apple don't appear to be working on a account sync feature at the moment so Chrome offering synchronization between my Windows, Mac, and iPhone is the next best thing for me, personally. I like having my bookmarks and history shared between my devices.

How would that work between my laptop and phone?

I would assume this is to compete with Apple's offerings (after all Apple doesn't just sign you into the browser, but into the OS nowadays). Apart from Chrome OS, Google doesn't have any other way to offer similar (tab-syncing, etc) functionality and signing you into their own browser is the closest they can get.

Syncing almost everything across devices. Super useful.

They want to be the next AOL browser internet appliance. It's called Chrome OS

With a blog named “The Keyword” is there any surprise they want to be AOL?