With the latest update, Google has limited the total number of bookmarks that you could sync across the Chrome mobile and desktop versions. This offering from the Silicon Valley giant undergoes quite a rigorous and sometimes weird A/B testing that no one has asked for in the first place. It tends to bring up a solution to the problem that didn’t even exist in the first place. The latest one to fall in this domain is the Sync Internals functionality.
According to a bug report filled in the Chromium Issue Tracker page, if a user has quite a lot of bookmarks saved in their browser, then it might slow down the entire browser experience and lead to performance and stability issues. This “new feature” was rolled out on 2023-03-21 and is meant to “Guard against users with way too many bookmarks in Sync”. Moroever, it went on to say that the issue is mostly felt across the mobile version though to its limited prowess.
Google Chrome Limits Bookmark Sync on Mobile and Desktop
As a result of which, Google has now decided to limit the bookmark sync to 20,000 on mobile and 1,00,000 on desktop. However, this hasn’t gone down too well with many users. Scrollintheigh that bug tracker, we have seen numerous reports from users who have more than 20,0o bookmarks saved on their device for the last 10 years and haven’t faced an iota of a slowdown.
But in spite of that, most of their bookmarks might now have to face the axe to bring down the number to the accepted 20K limit. This is going to cause a great deal of inconvenience to many users as it will end up breaking the cross-device sync functionality for most of their stored bookmarks.
Moreover, with smartphones nowadays having such an astronomical amount of RAM and a strong chipset under the hood, having a few additional hundred bookmarks synced doesn’t usually look like it will down the performance of the browser. But ultimately, this is what Google believes and we have no choice but to be in sync with their requirement.
Have I Been Affected?
If you have more than 20K bookmarks on your device or over 1,00,000 on your desktop, then head over to chrome://sync-internals/ and check out the Type Info column at the extreme right. If it displays the below error message, then the new change has unfortunately impacted your account:
Error: ConnectIfReady@components/sync_bookmarks/bookmark_model_type_processor.cc:460, datatype error was encountered: Local bookmarks count exceed limit.
On the other hand, if you get a green bookmark section, similar to the one shown in the image on the left, then you haven’t been impacted by this change, either because the number of saved bookmarks doesn’t reach this limit or Google is slowly rolling out this change and it might take a few days for the change to be implemented on your account.
What are your views on Google’s decision to limit bookmark sync across Chrome mobile and desktop? is it going to be beneficial in the long run or is just one of those unwanted changes that no one had asked for in the first place? Do share your valuable opinions with us in the comments section below.
