14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the very short release schedule, the people at Mozilla Labs always manage to get a significant number of new features and improvements with every iteration of their projects. The latest version of Mozilla Weave Sync is no exception, with 0.6 bringing a greatly improved and simplified UI as well as better performance during syncing. These, coupled with better error management, make the new extension a must-have update.
“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,” Dan Mills wrote for the Weave team. “If you have not looked at Weave recently, now is a great time to jump in and try it out! In this release we did a major overhaul of the user experience, as well as major improvements in terms of reliability and performance.”
Mozilla Weave Sync is a Firefox extension developed by the in-house experimental arm Mozilla Labs aimed at providing users with a unified browsing experience regardless of where they may be and what device or computer they may be using. This is done by syncing user data like bookmarks and preferences between different browser installs using the “cloud.” The extension is part of a bigger project at Mozilla which, when completed, aims to provide a cloud platform for storing user data – not just the browser-specific one, but also credentials and passwords – as well as support for outside services.
Weave Sync, the first component of the Weave platform, has seen sustained development not just for the current feature set, also laying the foundation for the things ahead. Some future plans for the project were previewed last week and already some of the features have been implemented in Weave 0.6, like the much needed UI redesign. The new interface unifies most settings and configuration options as setting up Weave before was a multi-stage process with users having to go through several steps when syncing the data for the first time or when installing the extension on a new browser.
Mozilla Weave Sync 0.6.0 for Firefox 3.5 is available for download here.