Google might not be actively working on the Google Browser Sync extension for Firefox, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sync your bookmarks, tabs, passwords, and more! Mozilla just released Weave 0.2, which is a major milestone for their homegrown extension. The new version contains all sorts of enhancements like a simplified setup process, intelligent scheduler for determining when to synchronize data, and much more.
The setup process is pretty straightforward, and it took just a minute for me to go through all eight steps. Here’s a bunch of screenshots for each of the things you’ll encounter when setting up a new Weave account:
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The nice thing with Weave is that you can have it synchronize bookmarks, browsing history, cookies, passwords, saved form data, and tabs with multiple computers. This is excellent news for anyone that uses multiple computers on a regular basis, or in my case, someone that just wants a thorough backup of important data (like bookmarks). Plus it looks like in the future they will support the synchronization of extensions, themes, search plugins, and microformats.
How often does Weave synchronize your data? The FAQ’s says that it’s at least every 20 minutes if any data has changed:
After the initial data transfer is completed during initial setup, Weave connects to the server periodically when it accumulates enough changes that need syncing or when enough time has passed since the last sync (at least once every 20 minutes if any data has changed). Weave also syncs when you start Firefox, when you quit it, and when you click on the “Sync Now” button in the Weave menu or the preferences.
Once you have completed the setup process you can always go back and adjust what gets synchronized by pulling up the Firefox preferences:
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All-in-all Weave is a terrific extension that is blossoming into something great. The main thing that I would like to get next is an online interface for managing bookmarks, but I haven’t seen any indication that they are working on this.
The Fine Print:
If you do decide to give Weave a whirl it does have some current incompatibilities. It doesn’t support OS X on Power PC, there’s no 64-bit Linux support, and some versions of Linux don’t always work. Plus Weave doesn’t work if you have the NoScript extension enabled.
I don’t know, I think I’ll stick with the Firefly Extension Backup Extension – [addons.mozilla.org] It’ll back up extensions, bookmarks, settings – pretty much any individual item as well as the complete user profile. You can do the backups manually or on a regular schedule that you set up.
That’s a good solution if you don’t need to take the data with you from one computer to another. I thought about doing that as well since all I really use this for is backups, but it’s nice to have an offsite backup just in case.
It’s a pity that it doesn’t support 64-bit Linux yet.
I dual boot Vista Home Premium 32 bit with Ubuntu 8 64-bit in my notebook, and I synced Firefox bookmarks in each OS using Foxmark extension. Really nice if I can synced everything else.
“(…) messaging capabilities to the platform.”. What’s that supposed to mean?
That’s a good question… I’m not really sure how it has “messaging capabilities.”
I guess technically if you and someone else used the same Weave account you could send them messages by creating bookmarks and syncing them.