Mozilla’s Weave gains momentum: two updates in two days
Although the Weave project at Mozilla is a prototype, I’m keeping very close tabs on it. The folks that brought you Firefox, Thunderbird and more realize that many people don’t use a single computing device any longer and there’s an opportunity there. Weave is that opportunity as it syncs up your Firefox data between devices. At the moment, the service only syncs Bookmarks, Cookies, History, Passwords, Form Data and Tabs, but the team plans to add Extensions and Themes to the mix as well. Essentially, if this all pans out, you can use Firefox on any computer and it will look, act and feel like it does on your main device.
Weave 0.2 hit the web a few weeks ago, but I’ve watched incremental upgrades over the past week or so. 0.2.3 and now 0.2.4 are out there for the taking. The latest version simply addressed a single issue but the prior day saw these items improve:
- Improved login dialog and process.
- Syncing manually and at shutdown will now open a modal popup with progressindication.
- Sync on shutdown will be skipped during a forced restart, e.g. add-on install, security updates,etc.
- Unscheduled syncs can now be cancelled.
- Locking errors are now handled gracefully.
- Performance updates to the server to reduce sync times.
I’ve just updated so I can’t report on the performance or other changes yet. And yes, this is still a prototype, so you might be better off with Foxmarks or another solution for now. However, I’m watching this project pick up steam so it’s definitely one to watch. Oh and if you have a Tablet PC and are running Firefox 3, I have a good observation to report. The beta candidate of Firefox 3.0.1 that we reported on last week has been a tremendous improvement for me. I went from 4-7 crashes daily in Firefox to absolutely none since I’ve installed it.
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I’ve used FF3 on XP and, since last Friday, on Vista, and I haven’t had a single crash. I only have a few extensions loaded, though (pdf download, session mgr, gmail mgr, yahoo notifier, flashblock, no script).
Weave is getting much better, its got through some very confusing log-in/passcard issues, that made the product almost useless.
I use it to synch FF on my mac and my work provided xp box. I do note that the synch does drag on the bandwidth limited slower xp box.
Its worth a try!!