Mozilla's Weave, a free add-on for Firefox that syncs your personal data across multiple PCs and mobile devices, is just about to graduate from a lab experiment to a stable, ready-for-primetime add-on.
The latest release of Weave brings the add-on to 1.0 status, though for now it remains a beta release. Weave 1.0 isn't significantly different than the Weave 0.8 release we covered earlier this month, but Mozilla does say that the latest version is significantly faster than earlier releases thanks to yet more refinements in Weave's incremental syncing tool.
The new syncing process happens in "chunks," which means even if you're syncing hundreds of pages at once, Weave shouldn't slow down your normal Firefox browsing. That said, we did experience a bit of a slow down on the initial sync. However, once Weave has uploaded your data, it runs transparently in the background and has little, if any impact on Firefox's performance.
Weave 1.0 also improves its integration with Firefox's preference pane, adding some sync options when setting up your Weave account. Instead of simply syncing from the PC you're using, Weave now gives you the option to sync from the current PC, to the current PC or merge to current PC with existing data.
Syncing itself has been tweaked slightly as well using what Mozilla calls an "interestingness" algorithm. The process is similar to how the Awesome Bar works in Firefox -- pages you visit frequently and those you've visited recently will sync ahead of less used pages in your history. For other data like bookmarks, the frequency data is combined with where the bookmark is stored. So, items visible in the bookmarks toolbar are ranked as "more important" and will sync before other bookmarks.
Weave 1.0 still carries the beta tag, but in our experience Weave is stable enough for everyday use. If you'd like to give it a try, head over the Mozilla Add-ons page and install Weave.
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