Mozilla Weave – Carry your web experience with you!

Every great organization has its own R&D wing. They spend a lot of money every year on this. It is because these organisations believe that this money is actually an investment to develop their USP. Time to time, revolutionary products hit the market simply because some organisation spent money for research of these products. Some products can be outrageous by challenging the way things are like the iPod or provide a better user experience like the Ribbon UI in Microsoft Office 2007 or simply provide more benefits to the company which invests in them. One such product is Mozilla Weave.

Mozilla weave is a plugin for the browser Firefox. It aims to provide the user the ability to carry their web experience with them. So you install this addon in all the computers that you will browse the internet. Lets say your office and at home. With this addon installed your entire browser activity which includes the bookmarks, passwords, history and other small things like your preferences get synchronised. I have tested these and they work really well. The recent version claims that even your tab history gets synchronised. That means, all your open tabs in one computer open automatically when the browser starts in your other computer!

Weave started out as a cloud based service for bookmark synchronisation in 2007. As it evolved in the labs, several new features were added and today, Mozilla has decided that Weave has matured enough in the labs and is ready for mainstream integration. So they gave it a new name called Mozilla Sync and will be added in the next version of Firefox by default. However, if you wish to install Weave (or Sync) in your current version of Firefox, then go to this URL

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10868/

and install it. Once installed, it will automatically ask you to create an user account. Create one if you dont have and from then on, all your web experience will be syncronised with the Mozilla cloud. So wherever you login with this user name and password to Weave, your web experience gets synchronised.

Initally Mozilla Weave was available only in Firefox. So just for this feature, many people are expected to use Firefox and thereby expanding its user base. Firefox is not only available on Windows and Linux and Mac but also on Nokia N900's Maemo environment. With that, Firefox has entered the mobile market and using Weave they can expand their user base rapidly with ease. There is one market they haven't entered yet and that is the iPhone market. A few days ago Opera mini became available for iPhone/iPod Touch users. However with the new name Sync, they have found a way to enter this market without actually introducing the browser. They have provided a client software for Sync as it is available as an API and hence you can sync your web experience even there now.

If you are a developer and wish to contribute to this product, then the following links might be of help to you

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Developer

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/ClientAPI

If you are not a developer and wish to contribute, you can still do so by setting up a server yourself for Sync for the benefit of thers. To do so, visit the following link

http://lifehacker.com/400110/set-up-mozilla-weave-on-your-own-server

Such brilliant creations are born in the labs of various organisations. In my next post, I shall discuss about one product from the labs of Google. Keep guessing what it is, till then take care!

- Harish.R