Firefox Sync 1.6.3

Like most office workers, you spend the majority of your time sat at the same PC. During a break during our working day, we’ll quickly skim through our favourite websites and add new sites to our bookmarks so we can visit later. The same applies at home, where we’ll have more time to add sites to our favourites and visit at our leisure. Snag is, if you use more than one computer, how do you transfer and, more importantly, keep updated the bookmarks across your machines?

There are various browser add-ons that try and make this possible. The most powerful was the Google Bookmark Sync add-on that would synchronise your Firefox bookmarks, irrespective of computer or location. You simply installed the add-on, synchronised your bookmarks with the Google server and then performed the same action on other computers.

Mozilla want to go much further than this and have been working on their Weave project, which is still part of the Mozilla Labs and probably not quite ready for primetime.

Mozilla Weave is an add-on for Firefox 3 users that will enable you to backup and synchronise your bookmarks across editions of Firefox, whatever the operating system or location. If you spend years collecting and storing bookmarks and RSS feeds, then have a system crash, you’d only need to install the Weave add-on, enter your username and password and all this info would be retrieved from the server.

At the moment Weave only enables you to automatically backup and synchronise bookmarks across your browsers (so you have the same bookmarks on every machine). In future, you’ll be able to share some bookmarks information with friends and family and more.

We’ve found Mozilla Weave to be stable, although it does appear to slow the browser from time to time, whilst it keeps synchronising your data with the Mozilla servers.