Mozilla Labs is working on several interesting projects at a time. Some graduate and become integral parts of Firefox, like Personas, but others are more long-run projects. One of them, Mozilla Weave, has the potential to change the way we use browsers and the web, but for now it's still pretty much in the early stages. The project is getting closer to becoming a reality, though, and it's getting ready for the beta stage with the release of Weave Sync 0.8.

“Weave Sync lets you securely take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including our mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs, as well as form-field history and preferences,” Mike Connor wrote for the Weave development team. “If you have not looked at Weave recently, now is a great time to jump in and try it out! In this last pre-beta release we have made a number of changes based on feedback from users.”

The Weave Sync Firefox extension is the first step of the Weave project, which has a broader scope of making the browser more connected with various web services. It just offers some basic synchronization options so far, but the extension is becoming more robust with each iteration. The latest 0.8 offers some big upgrades over 0.7 and shows exactly what the development team has been focusing on.

One of the biggest issues has been the download size and speed when syncing a browser for the first time or when updating the data. Weave 0.7 paved the way for the changes and now the latest version cuts down the download size in half. Incremental download, which enables Weave to prioritize the data which is most likely to be needed first, has also been tweaked to activate a lot more frequently. The preferences and setup UI, which got a major overhaul in 0.6, have now been redesigned to better integrate with the platform it's being run on, Firefox or Fennec. Weave 0.8 also comes with the usual set of bug fixes. The project isn't ready for a wider release just yet, but it's getting closer and Mozilla says it will move to the beta stage with the next release.


Mozilla Weave Sync 0.8 for Firefox 3.5 is available for download here.