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Starred by 9 users

Issue metadata

Status: Available
Owner: ----
Cc:
Components:
EstimatedDays: ----
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OS: Linux , Android , Windows , Chrome , Mac
Pri: 3
Type: Feature


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Online version of Chrome bookmarks similar to https://passwords.google.com

Reported by loorong...@gmail.com, Sep 30 2017

Issue description

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
tl;dr: Create an online version of Chrome bookmarks similar to https://passwords.google.com.

# Existing solutions and respective disadvantages

## Google Bookmarks (https://www.google.com/bookmarks/)
- A system completely separated from synced Chrome bookmarks.
- Designed for old IE users, not actively maintained.

## Export Chrome bookmarks to HTML file and upload to GDrive/Dropbox etc
- Need to manually upload HTML file, this is bad for users who add more bookmarks daily.
- Too many steps to upload file just once.
- Most online storage services do not provide HTML preview, user have to download HTML file.

## Third-party bookmarks sync service + Chrome extension
- Users do not like to depend on third-party service, especially when Google server already has their bookmarks.

## Sign in to Chrome (family/friend/public computer)

Based on observations in Chrome help forum, many users sign in to Chrome in device not owned by them to get their bookmarks **without knowing the consequences of sign in to Chrome**. This is one of the root causes of lost user data in many forum reports.

### Scenario 1: Sign in to Chrome on family/friend computer when the device has existing Chrome profile
- Most users do not know they can (and should) create a new Chrome profile.
- Bookmarks of family/friend's Chrome profile are overridden completely.
- User gets bookmarks from family/friend, then naively deletes bookmarks.
- Family/friend takes over the device, surprised that his/her bookmarks are gone:
  - Sign out of Chrome then delete user data: only family/friend's user data is lost.
  - Delete user data then sign out of Chrome: now even original user's data is lost too.

### Scenario 2: Sign in to Chrome on public computer
- Not all public computers wipe out user data before shutdown.

# Proposal

Create an online version of Chrome bookmarks similar to https://passwords.google.com.

Advantages
- Chrome sync already collects Chrome bookmarks automatically and regularly, no manual action needed.
- Only need to sign in to Google website, all potential user errors from sign in to Chrome can be avoided.
- Actively maintained by Google (hopefully).

It does not have to have all the functionalities found in chrome://bookmarks (add/edit/remove), even a simple viewer is enough.

Many users need to view Chrome bookmarks much more than viewing Chrome passwords.

What is the expected behavior?

What went wrong?
N/A

Did this work before? No 

Chrome version: 61.0.3163.100  Channel: stable
OS Version: 10.0
Flash Version:
 

Comment 1 by ew...@chromium.org, Oct 2 2017

Cc: k...@chromium.org mard...@chromium.org rpop@chromium.org ew...@chromium.org
Status: Untriaged (was: Unconfirmed)
+some PMs who think about bookmarks

Comment 2 by gangwu@chromium.org, Oct 11 2017

Labels: -Type-Bug Type-Feature
Labels: SyncHandoff2018
Status: Available (was: Untriaged)

Comment 4 by k...@chromium.org, Feb 15 2018

Cc: -k...@chromium.org

Comment 5 by treib@chromium.org, Feb 27 2018

Labels: -Pri-2 -Arch-x86_64 OS-Android OS-Chrome OS-Linux OS-Mac Pri-3
Cc: sabineb@chromium.org
Labels: Hotlist-ConOps

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