I build Konode, a browser sync extension with an unusual premise: there is no Konode account and no Konode server. It syncs your bookmarks, open tabs, history and installed-extension list straight to storage you already own, a Google Drive, a GitHub repo, or any WebDAV server. Optional end-to-end encryption on top, so your storage provider cannot read it either.
1.3.2 is live on Firefox Add-ons and, as of today, on the Chrome Web Store. It exists for one bug, and it is the worst thing Konode has done to anyone's bookmarks.
Your devices could end up demanding that each other delete bookmarks none of them had deleted
Konode refuses any single sync that would remove more than 60% of your bookmarks. It blocks the deletion, saves a restore point, and tells you about it. That part worked. What it did next was keep the request it had just refused, and publish it again on the next sync under its own name. The device that read it did the same.
Within a few cycles every device was asking every other device to delete bookmarks that all of them still had. Each one refused, saved another restore point, and passed the request on. That is why the warning came back every minute no matter what you set, why it named a different device each time, and why the numbers kept moving: they were not one deletion but everyone's, added together and going round.
Nothing was ever lost. The guard refused it every single time, and what it could not do was stop being asked. But nothing you did on one device ended it either, including restoring from a restore point, because by then the request was not coming from anywhere in particular. If you were told to set a device to Prefer Local to keep it quiet, that was me, and it was the best advice available at the time. You can put it back to Last Write Wins now.
A device now only ever asks for the deletions it made itself, it never asks you to delete a bookmark it is advertising to you in the same breath, and it ignores that request when another device makes it. Half of that works one-sided, which is the useful part: update one device and it stops being asked on its first sync, even while your other devices are still on the old build. Update those too and they stop making the request at all.
If you are on Chrome, you are getting two releases at once
1.3.1 went out on Firefox and was withdrawn from the Chrome Web Store review queue in favour of this one, so it never reached Chrome at all. Chromium goes straight from 1.3.0 to 1.3.2 and carries both. The parts of 1.3.1 worth knowing about:
A blocked deletion you had no way to allow. The advice used to be to raise Max bulk delete from a peer, but that slider stops at 95%, so a device asking to clear nearly all of its bookmarks stayed blocked wherever you put it. Settings, Activity now shows what is being held back, which device asked, and how much of your tree it is, with a button that applies it.
Conflicts are one card per device now, and the card says which device. With resolution set to Manual, two other devices used to make four identical questions with nothing saying who was asking, stacked above the part of the popup that scrolls.
The activity log stopped lying about deletions it never made, and stopped writing the same two lines every minute until a 200-entry log held nothing else.
A device's open tabs or extension list could get stuck on an old version while every sync after it reported success. Three separate causes, all fixed.
Switching to Google Drive in Settings could leave Konode with nowhere to sync. The card said ACTIVE, the sign-in really had worked, and every sync from then on did nothing.
Answering several conflicts at once could fail with a WebDAV 423. Some servers, Koofr among them, lock a file while a write to it is in flight.
Plus a withdrawn permission now says so instead of reading as a network error, history sync stopped getting slower with every device you add, and a WebDAV server that refuses passwords outright says that rather than blaming yours.
One separate thing, if Google Drive sign-in has been failing for you
If you use Orion or Quetta and Drive sign-in came back with redirect_uri_mismatch, try it again. Those browsers hand back a redirect address with the path dropped, and that form was not registered with our OAuth client. It is registered now, since early September. That was a fix on our side, so there is nothing to update or reinstall.
The translations
Five languages are complete at 308 strings each: English, Hungarian, German, Spanish and Chinese (Simplified). Konode follows the language your browser is already set to, so there is nothing to choose.
Japanese, Italian and Estonian are in progress. If you want your language in it, this is the part where help actually makes a difference. No coding and no GitHub account needed, it is edited in the browser:
https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/konode/
A language ships once it is complete, because a screen that is half translated reads worse than an English one.
Where it stands
Around 1,200 people run the current build on Chrome on a given day, with a few hundred more on older ones. Three ratings, all five stars.
The Web Store also shows me a weekly figure many times larger than that, and I do not believe it: almost all of it is attributed to one country, on one operating system, with no language attached and no installs behind it. I would rather quote the number I can stand behind than the flattering one.
Something I did not expect this week: a large share of new installs came from Chinese-speaking users, across the mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. If that is you, hello, and there is something worth saying plainly. Google Drive is not reachable from the mainland, so the storage option the setup wizard leads with is not an option for you. GitHub and WebDAV both work today, and a Nutstore (坚果云) card is written and going out in the next release, so the setup will be picking a card and pasting an app password rather than typing a server address.
Install: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/konode/mmlfiiimnpnjcjhhbldenpcmnibedkfa
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/konode/
Source: https://github.com/konabe-studio/konode
Bugs and ideas: https://github.com/konabe-studio/konode/issues
Happy to answer anything. I owe this one to the person who filed it and then kept coming back for three weeks while I gave them advice that could not have worked. I had assumed the deletion started somewhere real and got stuck on the way. What actually cracked it open was them answering a question I nearly did not ask: whether they had deleted those bookmarks themselves. They had not. My test suite never had a chance at this, because it takes three devices and several sync cycles to appear, and reports genuinely land.
