No Google Browser Sync

I used to use Google Browser Sync. I resisted it for a while, although Ian Sison at Q Software Research kept telling me how great it was. I resisted because I didn't think it would be useful (in the same way I didn't buy a celphone for years, and when I'd got one, I wouldn't send SMS messages because all the replies I got were illiterate). I also resisted using it because I was concerned about security. But BrowserSync won't sync passwords if you don't want it to.

When I finally installed it, it was just as with SMS. Eventually I was using it quite a lot (I also deal with fewer illiterates these days). I've given up on it though. I've removed it from all the firefox profiles I use. The main reason is that browser sync goes insane if the computer goes off without the browser being shut down nicely. Now, that doesn't happen a lot with me since I use linux, but I do occasionally use a computer that isn't on an AVR and when the power trips (gonna have a lot more of those for the next 3-4 months, it's summer now in the Philippines), BrowserSync loses its memory and tries to sync everything from the network when firefox comes back up. That takes too damn long, even on broadband. I don't want to wait 5 minutes or more for the browser to become usable again after a power outage. Once I went to sleep and in the morning it was still trying to sync. Something probably went wrogn with the bandwidth or the connection, but still...

In any case, i found myself cancelling the sync whenever this would happen. I was doing this enough that I finally realized there's no benefit to BrowserSync anymore. In any case, the only reason I really liked BrowserSync was, I could open a whole lot of windows in one browser, close it, go home (or to work, or to QSR, or wherever) start a browser, and have BrowserSync open the same windows/URLs. I was using it as a multi-client session synchronizer. After thinking about it though, I concluded that using it that way is anti-productive. Most of the time, when I'm reading articles from digg or reddit (or my feeds at bloglines) I'm just wasting time anyway. There's far too much to read, I spend too much time on it and not enough time thinking or coding.

Dropping BrowserSync increased my productivity by a bit because I didn't have to wait for syncs after power outages, and I didn't have to read non-work related articles at work. Of course I still read a lot at work. But it's more focused, it's more work related, and it's not synchronized all over the place :-).