So the cat’s out of the bag, now. I needed an excuse to learn some more Javascript, along with looking at how Google Chrome extensions look like, so I decided to add a sync feature to the excellent Minimalist for Gmail extension. It’s all in my own GitHub fork of Ansel’s repository. It will be integrated into the shipping branch soon, but I’ll probably keep experimenting for a while.
My little scripts for syncing Google Chrome search engines preferences are now available on GitHub, where it’s simpler for anyone to grab them and modify them.
That’s all!
After receiving some feedback, I’ve updated my scripts for syncing the search engine settings in Google Chrome. You can grab the new ZIP file here.
Here are the changes:
Enjoy!
Update: since Lifehacker featured this post on their home page, I released some simpler updated version of the scripts here.
The wonderful thing about open-source software is that whenever something’s missing, anybody can go ahead and fix it… that is, unless nobody cares enough about it. And that’s precisely what’s happening with the “search engines sync” feature in Google Chrome, which has been in Chromium’s bug database for more than a year and a half. Looks like Google is not so much in a hurry to let you use other search engines as soon as you install a fresh copy of their browser.
Oh, don’t look at me. I seriously don’t have the time to dive into such a big codebase to add the feature myself… but what I do have the time for is a little scripted hack to get around the problem quickly!
Robert Scoble famously posted about ditching Google Reader for Twitter a bit more than a year ago, and ever since I’ve been baffled at people moving to Twitter or Facebook to read their news. Business Insider even said a few months ago that Twitter has killed RSS readers. I’ve always been wondering how Twitter would be any better than RSS… that is, until I’ve actually tried it.
Now I’m just thinking those people are crazy out of their minds.
First, let’s put Scoble aside. This guy is clearly not your average user, he’s really out there. I mean, his performance concerns with Google Reader are completely legitimate, but he must be the only guy on earth that actually follows more than 20,000 people… and still uses the term “friends” to define them, by the way. And I’m not even talking about the feasibility of keeping up with that much information — after all, if he’s clever, he’s using tools to consume it all and make the trending subjects bubble up to the surface, or maybe he does it the other way around by searching for topics he’s interesting in right now instead of reading the timeline in a linear fashion. But average people (or, well, at least me) are following real friends (either their blogs, or the links/videos/pictures they share), a few websites pertaining to their interests that may not be related to web technology (knitting? cat breeding?), and other things that can’t be processed by some “trending” tool.
Anyway, I used Twitter instead of Google Reader for a couple months, and here’s what I found.