One of the less-trumpeted features of the recent major Chrome update: it now syncs your search engines and keyword bookmarks, meaning that you can take full advantage of keyword bookmarks on all your machines using Chrome.
We’ve always been big fans of keyword bookmarks on Firefox, and the ability to add them to Chrome was crucial for power users to be convinced to make the switch. Not only do keyword bookmarks let you access any site with a fixed combination of letters, which is great for keyboard shortcut junkies, they also let you search specific sites directly by adding search terms to the keyword. I have keyword bookmarks set up for searching all kinds of sites: Lifehacker itself, Flickr, eBay, iTunes, Gizmodo, IKEA, Kotaku . . . the list goes on.
But until this update, the stable version of Chrome didn’t actually sync keyword bookmarks, meaning you had to manually recreate your favourites or use third-party solutions like Shortmarks. Last October, Chrome added the ability to actually sync keyword bookmarks to the dev channel, and that has now hit the stable version. I’m very grateful.
The one tweak Google needs to incorporate? The ability to stop sites automatically adding themselves to your search engine list. I have a carefully curated collection, and I don’t want it swamped with additions from sites I might only visit once. I understand having it switched on by default, but being able to switch it off would be awesome.
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