Mozilla Reveals Some Future Plans for Its Cloud Sync Project Weave

Just as Google released its latest developer channel build of the Chrome web browser sporting brand-new bookmark syncing capabilities, Mozilla also provided an update on the short-term and long-term development focus of its own synchronizing technology, Weave. Mozilla Weave 0.5 was launched just a short while ago and 0.6 is just around the corner, but the project has much bigger plans than what is obvious in the current iteration.

In the short term, Mozilla is focusing on synchronizing performance, especially the initial sync, the first time users upload the bookmarks to the service or download them to a browser. One “Weave Enhancement Proposal” (WEP) aims to decide what data to get from the server initially and what can be postponed until later. Another WEP focuses on finding out what part of the data is the most important so that it would be prioritized. Finally, yet another proposal, which is more long-term, is to create a remote proxy service to handle the encryption and decryption of the data for underpowered devices like mobile phones or netbooks.

Another major focus is on usability and changes should come as soon as the 0.6 release. Setting up Weave was somewhat cumbersome, so the upcoming version brings a revamped sign-up and setup process with some big UI changes, which should make for a smoother experience. One aspect that the developers are still working on is providing a unified password for the service and the encryption and decryption of the data.

However, Mozilla, much like Google with its sync technology, has much bigger plans for the Weave project than just bookmark syncing. “Weave, as a Mozilla Labs project, is a collection of experiments around integrating services in/with the browser. The two most active experiments we have going on are related to synchronizing your web experience and integrating identity in the browser,” Ragavan Srinivasan wrote on the Mozilla Labs blog. “[I]n the short term, Weave is going to be mostly about Sync. We are also thinking about launching a separate development train for all the neat experiments we’ve been planning.”

You can download the latest Mozilla Weave Sync 0.5.0 for Firefox 3.5 right here.