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?

One of the things I’m really enjoying using is Google’s Browser sync firefox extension. I work across a number of computers, at home and in the office - aside from maintaining my bookmarks in sync it keeps my browser history in sync, so a search that i carried out for ‘blog design’ on my work laptop shows the same results in Google as ‘read’ on my home computer - i love it! If you haven’t checked it out yet then its well worth checking out!

I just discovered something in Firefox when it comes to ‘view source’ - perhaps everyone already knows about it but I thought I’d share it just in case.

It appears when you do View Source in Firefox an additional HTTP request is made to the server to pick up the file, whilst IE just displays the already rendered HTML. I came across this when dealing with a user validation page. The user clicks on a link in an email and comes into the webpage whereupon their account is made active and they get to set a password, if i did ‘View Source’ I kept seeing the message they’d see if they tried activating their account twice - what I as expected to see was the html for the change password form. In IE i saw the code for the form, not important just something to bear in mind!

I’ve just seen that Mozilla foundation have released 1.0.2 of Firefox, details available here.

At last (well, 5 days ago) the most useful Firefox extension i use was updated to work with FF 1.0 - what is the extension? the Bookmark Synchronizer. It allows you to FTP your bookmarks up to a webserver either manually or when you close Firefox, you can then configure any other computer you use to grab the same bookmarks file - i’m between laptops and desktop so it’s an absolute life saver! You can grab the extension from the Mozilla extension site here

What other extensions can you not do with out in Firefox?

Firefox 1.0 final is now available for download from www.mozilla.org. Time to get updating!!

Mozilla have now released the second Release Candidate for Firefox, getting ready for it’s 1.0 launch next week

Looking at their site Thunderbird has now reached version 0.9

with just 13 days to go until Firefox 1.0 goes final the Mozilla org have released the first release candidate of Firefox. I’ve replaced my preview release with this version and i’m a whole lot more happy. I suffered from the memory leak issue (which has been fixed) when using LiveMarks and can now have about half a dozen tabs open without using excessive amounts of memory.

More info regarding bug fixes can be found here

Then make a donation to the Firefox project’s campaign for the first open source funded full page ad in the NYT in preparation for the 1.0 launch of Firefox on 9th November.

Read more here.

After yet more digging around on the firefox website I came across spreadfirefox.com. Mozilla’s first target is to get 1 million downloads of firefox over the next 10 days, there’s a counter here showing the progress and links to loads of other firefox goodies.

If you’re thinking about downloading Firefox, please use my affiliate link on the right hand side, there’s no reward for me - just recognition for promoting a great browser