Mozilla Labs announced a development milestone by releasing Weave 0.2 of its browser synchronization tool Tuesday.
Weave is a Firefox extension which synchronizes your browser settings securely over browser sessions. The platform introduces Firefox to the concept of data portability – the ability to access and control your data remotely by storing it over the internet.
Today's development milestone adds additional data synchronization, encryption, and messaging capabilities to the platform.
Weave enhances your browser experience by ensuring, when installed, you can access your bookmarks, cookies, browser history, saved passwords, tabs and saved form data from any computer automatically or on demand.
Key improvements in 0.2 introduce a greater level of security to the program. When you install Weave, the add-on will automatically encrypt your settings and store them on a remote server. Your data is stored on Mozilla's servers under your account name and encrypted using a passcode of your choice. The passcode ensures only you can decrypt your data while the Mozilla account created on installation ensures only you can access it – in all, these requirements make Weave, and your data, pretty secure.
Mozilla stores your data on https://services.mozilla.com by default, but the server is editable through advanced settings. No word yet on the availability of alternate servers or if you can set up your own server.
Browser settings are updated online asynchronously, rather than by time intervals, so changes you make appear through other browsers in "real-time."
Weave also features the foundations for enabling read-only viewing of your bookmarks by other users you determine using the XMPP messaging standard. XMPP is an open XML based standard which will ensure your bookmarks can be easily integrated with other applications when the feature is fleshed out.
Still on Weave's to-do list: support for OS X on Power PC and Linux 64-bit distributions and adding synchronization of extensions, themes, search plugins and microformats. Down the road, Weave will also synchronize your information with mobile devices as well.
Weave 0.2 is available for download by testers only. The Weave website warns testers of a lot of the frayed edges to the program which will have to be worked out before a public release.
It's a shift away from the dominant paradigm in social networking referred to as "user lock-in," where a site collects and stores your information, only letting you control it or make use of it while you're at the site. As Mozilla's Chris Beard points out in a thread on the Mozilla Labs forums, "to be clear, we don't want anyone's data and that's one of the reasons why we're planning on using client-side encryption… The aim here is to explore building an architecture that provides people better control of their data and who has access rights to which bit of it while providing new opportunities for user experience innovation."
Weave seems like a natural progression from other Mozilla projects like The Coop status manager and Operator, the Firefox extension for handling microformats.
Weave 0.2 is a step forward from its previous 0.1 version, which offers similar functionality to other openly available third-party tools – for example, the recently open-sourced Google Browser Sync. Other alternatives include plenty of toolbars designed to sync your Firefox bookmarks with various web services: Foxmarks synchronizes your bookmarks in much the same way Weave does. Del.icio.us, Google and Yahoo Toolbars also synchronizes your online account settings and bookmarks between browsers and web services.
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