Apart from speed and robustness, one of the best features of Google Chrome over any other browser is cloud sync. Your bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions, preferences, auto fill options and themes are automatically backed up to your Google account, so you can quickly restore them on any other computer.  If you browse the web in your office computer and make changes to bookmarks, settings or change a password, the changes will automatically reflect in your home computer.

While Google Chrome’s cloud sync is perfect, the developers have added two more options under the sync belt – the ability to sync open tabs and custom search engines. Before you head over to Google Chrome’s options page to enable this feature, type chrome://flags/ in the address bar and enable syncing open tabs and syncing custom search engines in Google Chrome:

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Relaunch now” to restart Google Chrome.

Now go to the options page, navigate to “Personal stuff” and click “Customize” under your Google Chrome sync profile. You should get the option to sync open tabs and all your custom search engines, following is an example:

I tested both the features in Google Chrome’s latest stable release (15.0.874) and it worked as advertised. This feature is a lifesaver when you have more than 20 open tabs in Google Chrome and the browser crashed or your laptop ran out of power. You can always re-open the last used tabs on the same computer but there is no way you can re-open the last used tabs on another system, running Google Chrome. With open tabs sync added to chrome, no longer you have to worry about which tabs were open in your office computer and which webpages you were reading on your home computer. Personally, I would prefer the “bookmark all tabs” option over open tab sync, as Google Chrome sync is not real time yet. However, if the browser crashes or your operating system goes to sleep, this little setting might just save the day.

Another feature I am loving in the latest release of Google Chrome is the experimental smooth scrolling (activate it from Chrome://flags). Gives a feeling of scrolling in a touch device, with your mouse wheel – of course!