Is the Sync up?

HotCakeX "Beta should be still fine though ..."

Beta is not experiencing all of the problems Dev and Canary users have been experiencing, to be sure, because the last Beta build was released before Microsoft started to change/develop sync in Dev and Canary builds.

However, sync is not exactly "fine" in the Beta version, either. Favorites sync is either extremely slow (as Rohit Yadav commented about other builds) or broken in the current Beta build, if my recent experience is indicative.

A few days ago, I took the time to prepare EdgeClassic Favorites for the January cutover, working to create a test environment for the cutover, so that I can see and understand exactly what will happen with the EdgeClassic to EdgeChromium cutover.

I am primarily interested in what will happen on a computer on which EdgeChromium has never been installed (because I maintain 20-odd computers in that state for a railroad museum where I volunteer), but I'm also curious about what will happen on computers on which EdgeChromium is installed.

I've read the available Microsoft information currently available on the cutover (intended, primarily, for Enterprise customers rather than consumers), but I know, from long experience in IT, that planned results often differ from actual results, so I decided to set up a test environment to anticipate the issues I'll face after the cutover.

In any event, I took the following steps:

EdgeClassic: I cleaned out most of the Favorites on my desktop computer, reducing the number of Favorites to 16 on the Favorites Bar and 11 in the Bookmarks Menu. I then changed the name of each Favorite/Bookmark to mark the origin as coming from EdgeClassic. "Forum" became "ForumE", for example. When I was done with that, I started up three laptops linked to my MSA, two of which had EdgeChromium Beta installed and one of which had never had EdgeChromium installed in any form. The three laptops synced correctly within minutes.

EdgeChromium: I repeated the steps I had taken with EdgeClassic (cleaned out most of the Favorites, set up the same 16/11 Favorites, and renamed, this time to "C" rather than "E", as in "ForumC"). When I was done with that, I started up the two laptops that had EdgeChromium installed (the laptop on which EdgeChromium had never been installed was irrelevant to this step, obviously).

What I found, to my surprise, was that the EdgeChromium two laptops did not sync quickly and accurately.

On the Favorites Bar, for example, some of the renamed Favorites showed up immediately, but others did not, and the results were inconsistent between the two laptops (e.g. "ForumC" replicated on all, but others like "AmzC" showed up on one but not the other, and others like "YmailC" did not show up at all).

Eventually, several hours and several browser restarts later, all of the favorites/bookmarks had correctly synced, but EdgeChromium sync is clearly not yet as quick or flawless as EdgeClassic sync.

More problematic, though, was EdgeChromium's sync behavior with respect to the deleted bookmarks from the "Other Favorites" menus. After 5-6 hours, some of those deleted bookmarks and folders had still not been removed from the laptop computers, and again the results were different on the two laptops. Sync would have eventually deleted all of the bookmarks, I assume, but I lost patience with the process at that point, and manually deleted the unremoved favorites on both laptops.

So something is not right with sync, even on the Beta build.

Based on these results and on the reports about myriad problems Dev and Canary users have been having with sync, I'm not confident that the EdgeClassic to EdgeChromium cutover is going to work either smoothly or flawlessly when the cutover happens in January.

I'll find out when it happens, I guess.  The good news is that all of the computers at the railroad museum are Win10Pro, so I can block the cutover until I've tested and have a migration protocol worked out.