This is the bookmarks you save in your Google account, at https://www.google.com/bookmarks/. It's not your web browser's bookmarks. It doesn't even sync with your Chrome bookmarks when you're logged in to Chrome.
It does seem like an odd product to kill off. It's one of those things that takes very little dev resources, and it's probably really useful to the few people who actually use it. Another example of Google's odd product decisions I guess.
You never know about these very old products. It might be built on Python 2 or something that the company is trying to turn down across the fleet. There may be no one left at the company who knows how the app is built, etc.
Also, keeping a service running exposes you to liability in the event of a data breach or GDPR violation. As I understand it, even if a tiny service that nobody cares about is found to violate the GDPR, the company can be fined up to 4% of its global revenue, which for Google would be quite a lot of money.
Google truly have a knack for competing with themselves. Hopefully this shutdown represents further consolidation rather than part of ongoing product churn.
It would be weird to couple together the Chrome bookmarks and Google bookmarks at https://www.google.com/bookmarks, by doing so Chrome bookmarks which is a browser specific concept would only be accessible through an internet connection, thereby making bookmarking an extension of a cloud based Google product rather than something the user can choose to decouple.
A better solution could be to automatically backup users Google bookmarks in a new folder under the Chrome bookmarks or move them to Collections which seems to be the new Google bookmarks
You could easily have chrome bookmarks work offline and also sync with chrome bookmarks.
Other services have been able to do this in the past. There’s likely code on GitHub that takes some managing that can do this with other bookmarking services.
If Google Maps stars were added/synced to Bookmarks, it makes sense for Chrome bookmarks to have some coupling as well when Chrome bookmark syncing was introduced.
Sorry, you misunderstood me. My argument was not that they should've introduced Chrome bookmarks and then merged them together.
My argument was that they should not have introduced two separate things when improving the one that already existed to simply work offline would have sufficed.
