Ongoing sync between Microsoft Edge and Chrome - Discussion

• akhator  says: If you are still looking for ongoing sync between Microsoft Edge and Chrome, please share some more details about your scenario.

I am looking for ongoing, bidirectional, sync between MS Edge and Chrome, as I describe below.

• Why would you like an ongoing sync between the two? What problem would it solve for you?

I would like ongoing bidirectional sync for reasons that include the following:

a)  I would like to use MS Edge  because it has the reputation of being better in combination with Dragon speech recognition, which I need for accessibility reasons.

b)  however, my employer is a Google shop:  Gmail, Google docs, Google accounts,…  My employer's IT department is reluctant to support MS Edge, and only officially supports Google Chrome and Chrome apps. I know that they are supposed to work in both places,  but if IT  refuses to look at MS Edge when I have a problem…

c)  Nevertheless, I would like to be able to use MS Edge for both work and personal as long as it doesn't have trouble. But when I need help from IT, I may have to switch back using Chrome.   and when I switch back, it is more convenient to have my environment synced,  including bookmarks/favorites etc.

d)  furthermore, some of my work involves developing  webpages,  server-side apps, and browser side apps that must render on  multiple browsers. Chrome and FireFox required; MS Edge  is not yet a requirement, but it sure would be nice to make  them work on MS Edge because I would like to use MS Edge.  On Windows and  Linux,  Android and iPhone and some IoT.   It would be nice to be able to develop some of these things on MS Edge, e.g. composing the JavaScript writing, but I'm not yet able to switch  completely. Anyway, wherever I work I would like to have my environment, at the very least my bookmarks.

 By the way, my priority for synchronization is as follows:

*  bookmarks -  at the very least because some of the web locations that I need to test will be in my bookmarks

*  extensions/add-ons -  nice to have, not required

*  passwords and accounts -  almost definitely not,  except for the minimum required to synchronize bookmarks. I certainly will not use browser password management. I use LastPass.

• Do you expect to leverage this ongoing sync only for a short period of time (for instance during initial assessment of Microsoft Edge) or for long period (continue to use multiple browsers)?

Forever. Or at least until one of Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome is end-of-lifed.

Forever -  for the "develop stuff  that targets multiple browsers",  and also the "develop using tools that run in multiple browsers" use cases.

For the foreseeable future  I expect to want to be able to switch transparently between MS Edge and Google Chrome, i.e. using both of them as "home"  browsers.  in much the way that I  maintain the same environment on Firefox and Chrome.   Sync, though, always has problems.

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BTW, since syncing bookmarks is my primary concern,  I do have another  option:   I can try to avoid using browser bookmarks, and save the  links that I want to save in a shared document.  E.g. in Google Drive,   which I know  allows concurrent manipulation  from different machines and accounts  and has good enough off-line support . 

It is possible that the same thing could be done in MS OneDrive,  although I had enough problems with concurrent editing and Synchronization failures in  OneDrive that I am reluctant to do that at this time.

I have used the DIY cloud file system approach for synchronizing bookmarks before, although at the moment I don't have any plug-ins and make it particularly easy.

I would be very happy if Microsoft Edge provided the ability to store bookmarks/favorites in a OneDrive or other cloud file system file. Not just export once, but continuously. Ideally, if MS Edge just used the cloud file as the bookmark/favorite storage.  Not only would this solve the bookmark/favorite synchronization problem in a more generic way, but it would also make bookmarks much more useful, because in such a file you can format and add a lot more metadata than you can in the typical browser-based bookmark system.

However, that would only solve  the bookmarks/ favorites synchronization issue.  it would not solve the other issues like extensions, although as  I note those are much less important to me.

• How would the absence of this ability change your perspective on Microsoft Edge adoption?

Although I am eager to use MS Edge  to get better Dragon voice recognition, I simply cannot commit to using it  while my IT department does not support it and while MS Edge does not synchronize my environment continuously and bidirectionally with Google Chrome.

Until there is continuous and bidirectional synchronization, I am just playing with MS Edge. Not really using it. Not using it as my primary browser or even my secondary browser.

Would the creation of a Chrome extension fulfil your requirement?

It depends on what the Chrome extension does.    if the extension does continuous and bidirectional synchronization, yes.  if the extension allows all bookmarks on both Google Chrome and MS Edge to be saved in a shared cloud file, yes

But if the extension is just an export once, no.

If the extension is a slightly better export, that allows merges of data from both browsers, maybe.  that would be good enough to make it possible to use MS Edge more often,  but having to manually merge provides friction that would be an impediment. And at the moment, if there is friction,  MS Edge loses.