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You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data. Google Chrome now has a "feature" that will automatical

You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data. Google Chrome now has a "feature" that will automatically reset your homepage, search settings, wipe all extensions and wipe all extension data whenever it detects an unexpected change to any of your settings files or they do not match up to the PC they are locked to. The goal was to prevent third parties from hijacking your search engine within Chrome. Things like bundleware installers on Windows that switch it. The actual result is that all your settings are now locked to a specific PC and will be reset anytime anything changes. As the developer of Google Chrome Portable, this means only your bookmarks move with you as you move PCs unless you're logged in. This also means that even if you backup your Chrome install, if your PC dies, you can not restore that Chrome install on another PC. Your bookmarks will be restored, but you will lose your settings, extensions, and passwords since your profile was moved to a new PC. This stands in stark contrast to Firefox which is completely self-contained. If a third party bundleware installer hijacks your search engine or homepage, you can simply set them back as they should be. All your extensions, extension settings, etc will continue working as expected whether or not you opt to use Firefox Sync.

vxNsr 12y ago
Well at least there's a reasonable explanation, and even if I don't like it for myself, as an IT guy I totally understand where they're coming from.
terminado 12y ago
You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data. Oh man... Settings and bookmarks are not "data" in any substantial sense. Incognito mode at all times, no Google ID ever, trash local history on every exit. I don't carry the expectation that my bookmarks must live on and follow me from machine to machine. I don't care about what my search preferences are. I simply turn address bar searches off, or point it to localhost. I don't conduct rampant web searches from the address bar, because an address bar is an address bar, and I only feed it well-formed URLs. I don't waste my time regularly using web sites that can't provide me with a URL that isn't intended to be typed, and sub pages that I can't readily navigate to. Address to long? No soup for you. Absurd URL parameters? No soup for you. Deeply nested pages, locked away behind a login, 30 clicks deep, and obscured by dark patterns? No. Soup. For. You. Preferences are preferences, and that's all they are. The default install should be completely useful and practical as-is, on a clean install. If it isn't then preferences should be exportable to plaint-text using an open standard. Firefox happily dumps its bookmarks as simple JSON. As a result, when I want to transport my bookmarks I can, although, digging back into my archive more than a year 50% tend to perish due to simple link rot.
- corndoge 12y ago
  Judging by your comment, I bet you're also fed up with the web being overloaded and scripted to hell to build enterprise applications on top of a system that was only designed to deliver plain readable text with links to other plain readable text. Me too. I think web applications should never have existed. The web was designed for hypertext, images, and other static consumable content. It wasn't designed to be a platform for massive distributed applications. Why are there so many security fuckups on the web? Because it wasn't designed to be secure. The fact that people are now programming desktop applications in JavaScript against NodeJS suggests to me that the web has gone too far. We should have built something new to handle what we now call "web applications". I, too, look at huge disgusting URLs every day and wonder why we didn't see this coming.
  - thetinguy 12y ago
    Don't worry, soon the URLs will be hidden from view.
    - omeid2 12y ago
      Soon? try Safari on iOS 6 or later.
  - omeid2 12y ago
    What does Node.js has to do with web in the context of being a platform? Sure, it is used for mostly for developing http apis but that doesn't make it "web".

vxNsr 12y ago

Well at least there's a reasonable explanation, and even if I don't like it for myself, as an IT guy I totally understand where they're coming from.

terminado 12y ago

You absolutely must link your Google Chrome install to your Google ID on Windows or you will lose data. Oh man... Settings and bookmarks are not "data" in any substantial sense. Incognito mode at all times, no Google ID ever, trash local history on every exit. I don't carry the expectation that my bookmarks must live on and follow me from machine to machine. I don't care about what my search preferences are. I simply turn address bar searches off, or point it to localhost. I don't conduct rampant web searches from the address bar, because an address bar is an address bar, and I only feed it well-formed URLs. I don't waste my time regularly using web sites that can't provide me with a URL that isn't intended to be typed, and sub pages that I can't readily navigate to. Address to long? No soup for you. Absurd URL parameters? No soup for you. Deeply nested pages, locked away behind a login, 30 clicks deep, and obscured by dark patterns? No. Soup. For. You. Preferences are preferences, and that's all they are. The default install should be completely useful and practical as-is, on a clean install. If it isn't then preferences should be exportable to plaint-text using an open standard. Firefox happily dumps its bookmarks as simple JSON. As a result, when I want to transport my bookmarks I can, although, digging back into my archive more than a year 50% tend to perish due to simple link rot.

corndoge 12y ago
Judging by your comment, I bet you're also fed up with the web being overloaded and scripted to hell to build enterprise applications on top of a system that was only designed to deliver plain readable text with links to other plain readable text. Me too. I think web applications should never have existed. The web was designed for hypertext, images, and other static consumable content. It wasn't designed to be a platform for massive distributed applications. Why are there so many security fuckups on the web? Because it wasn't designed to be secure. The fact that people are now programming desktop applications in JavaScript against NodeJS suggests to me that the web has gone too far. We should have built something new to handle what we now call "web applications". I, too, look at huge disgusting URLs every day and wonder why we didn't see this coming.
- thetinguy 12y ago
  Don't worry, soon the URLs will be hidden from view.
  - omeid2 12y ago
    Soon? try Safari on iOS 6 or later.
- omeid2 12y ago
  What does Node.js has to do with web in the context of being a platform? Sure, it is used for mostly for developing http apis but that doesn't make it "web".