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.
Note that this is a major new revision of Mozilla Weave and expects you to
create a new account in order to synchronise your bookmarks. Slightly
frustrating if you've already got a Weave account. Even so, seems to have been
polished slightly and will now enable you to synchronise open tabs as well as
form data.