Users of Google Chrome Who have Thousands of Bookmarks are Having Trouble Keeping Them All in Sync

Before Psy’s hit single Gangnam Style broke the billion-view barrier, we had yet to learn there was a cap on the total number of times a video could be viewed on YouTube. As a result, Google was forced to redesign the counter that shows how many times a video has been viewed on YouTube. Now, people using the most popular web browser, Google Chrome, report a recently introduced hard limit, this time on the number of bookmarks that can sync across your devices.

You shouldn’t be surprised if the web pages you recently bookmarked for reference on one device need to be synced with other devices using the same Google account if you have several thousand bookmarks in Chrome. If you have that many bookmarks, you can expect this to happen. After Google introduced a new Chrome feature on March 21 designed to “guard against users with too many bookmarks in sync,” a user on Reddit named MartyMacGyver ran into this cap and got into trouble. Because of this change, the number of bookmarks that can be accessed across multiple devices using a single Google account has been arbitrarily capped.

Google still needs to confirm the number of bookmarks that will cause the sync to fail for you. Despite this, a bug report regarding this issue reveals that the limit is well into the thousands: 20,000 bookmarks for Chrome on mobile devices and 100,000 bookmarks for Chrome on desktops. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell if you are affected until you notice that new bookmarks are not syncing. Chrome does not give you a single warning about this issue. If you have reason to believe that it is occurring, you can visit the following page in Chrome’s settings: browser://sync-internals

Imagine for a moment that you have reached this new limit. If this is the case, you will see the following error message for Bookmarks in the About tab’s Type Info section when you go to the page above.

Error:

ConnectIfReady@components/sync_bookmarks/bookmark_model_type_processor.cc:460,

Because syncing too many bookmarks takes time, potentially freezing the UI and creating a sluggish user experience, Google is likely now tinkering with bookmarks in its never-ending pursuit to make Chrome faster. This is because syncing too many bookmarks creates a backlog. We will have to give Google the benefit of the doubt and assume that it does not intend to implement a paywall for bookmark sync.

The limit that Google places on the maximum number of pages that can be synchronized is sufficient. However, the problem affects many people, particularly those who use power. People who have used Chrome for many years may have accumulated many bookmarks and may require assistance syncing them across their various devices. Power users, doing their best, have attempted to circumvent the limit by turning sync on and off multiple times, but their efforts have been fruitless. Thank goodness someone has already filed a bug report.

There are many potential solutions to this problem; however, Google could develop an opt-in Chrome flag that would unlock sync beyond a certain limit. In this manner, most users restricted by the bookmark sync cap can take advantage of the brisk experience that Google developed. On the other hand, individuals who put bookmark synchronization at the top of their priority list can flip a switch and continue with their lives in a synced state. If users reach the maximum number of bookmarks that can be synchronized with Chrome, the browser should, at the very least, display a warning to them. Because of this, they would be able to remove bookmarks that were not necessary, thereby making room in the metadata file for more recent bookmarks. In light of this, what Google will do now.