Mozilla Weave 1.0 Final Released
Mozilla Weave is an add-on for Mozilla products that can sync data between multiple installations of the Firefox web browser.
Weave can for instance be used by Firefox users to synchronize bookmarks, passwords, filled forms, preferences or the web browsing history between multiple computer systems running the web browser with the Weave add-on installed, even if they are not connected to the same local network.
Weave is a Mozilla Labs project to integrate web services into Firefox by allowing users to securely share their data with other instances of their own software, other users and 3rd parties. The Weave project includes a Firefox add-on, a server component, and data sharing APIs.
Mozilla Weave
The basic Weave client uses Mozilla web servers to store the encrypted information so that all Weave installations can access the data regardless of the power state of individual devices connected to the user account.
Weave users need to create an account - or more than one - that needs to be used on all computer systems to authorize the computer system so that account data can be transferred.
The data that gets synchronized this way can be selected in the the options. While you can keep everything enabled for synchronization, it gives users who want only some of the data synced options to do so.
A Weave server was released as well which can be used by companies to implement Weave on their servers so that no third party server like the Mozilla Weave server is used for data storage and transfers.
Mobile users can look forward to Weave 1.0 being released tomorrow for Maemo with the likelihood that support for other devices is expanded in the near future once the Firefox mobile developers start supporting those devices in upcoming releases.
Weave can be downloaded from the Mozilla website. The add-on is compatible with all Firefox 3.5 to 3.7x versions.
Update: Mozilla Weave the add-on is no longer available. Mozilla has integrated its synchronization functionality however natively in the Firefox web browser.
Firefox users who want to sync data between different computer systems can now open the Options and switch to the Sync tab there to configure the feature. It is necessary to create an account though as data is currently synced using Mozilla servers.
We have published a guide that explains how to set up and use Firefox Sync on newer versions of the browser.
So I went ahead and in stalled Weave. I think that it is useful, but the lack of profiles for accounts does hurt.
To answer my own question for others:
1) Not sure yet. I have used it for 3 days now, and I have not seen a problem with it.
2) No. I am currently still using Xmarks to sync my bookmarks.
2) Can I select different bookmark folders to be excluded for syncing at work computers? Some things are better not being on work computers…
+1 to this question. My bookmarks is very different for home and office, I wont to sync only some of folders.
I have been hoping for this 1.0 release for a long time. I have been a happy consumer of xmarks/foxmarks, for awhile now.
I have a couple of questions before I go for this:
1) how well does it work syncing between Linux and Windows installations? I am thinking that this is probably a non-issue, but I would like confirmation.
2) Can I select different bookmark folders to be excluded for syncing at work computers? Some things are better not being on work computers…