JohnBs personal blog

“Weave is a early prototype framework for Web services integration with the browser”

Certainly that doesn’t give much away about what Mozilla Weave is but it is definitely worth looking at. At it’s roots, Mozilla Weave pretty much does (on the surface) what Google Browser Sync did it terms of allowing you to synchronise/backup multiple Firefox installations, this includes bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords and form data.

Just like Google Browser sync it’s implemented as Firefox addin. On your first sync it’s immediately obvious that it’s different to GBS as the data you store is encrypted with your chosen passphrase, so no-one has access to the data server side. In fact, the server that the data is stored on is just a WebDav server (if you go to https://services.mozilla.com after you’ve signed up you can browse your directory to see what’s in there) so you can run your own server to store the data. What’s cool about the Mozilla Weave implementation is that you can share your data, i.e. bookmarks with friends/other parties, despite the data being encrypted! There’s not much more detail on this yet, nor looking around in this early version are there any signs of it having being taken advantage of it but it’s going to be in there at some point.

Mozilla Weave is still an early prototype so not all the features are working, I’m going to have it installed in parallel with Foxmarks but I think it’s going to a pretty cool feature of Firefox. I wonder…if the other browsers are extensible could plugins be written to sync the likes of IE/Safari to the same set of data?