Firefox Weave 0.2

Today, Mozilla’s Labs put online their latest product called Weave. Weave is a synchronization add-on for firefox that allows you to access your cookies, bookmarks, history, favorites and so on from other computers. This is not their latest release from Weave although it is the most stable yet.

How does it work?: Weave works as such. When first installed and did the familiar restart of Firefox. Weave will prompt you to enter a username/password and an encryption key. After that you will be able to select a number of things you want the server to save. Bookmarks, themes, individual addons, saved password and more. Nearly all the heavy lifting is done client side so Mozilla’s server have very little to do exept accept registerations and save user settings. Here is a comprehensive schematic on how the information is handled.

As you can figure anyone with your encryption key, username and password can access your data on any computer in the world. Can you see the makings of a future “Cloud computer”¹ system? I do, just by looking over the single fact that you could put a whole computer in a remote server and access all of your documents just by having a monitor plugged to the server. More on that later. Weave is not finished yet so if you want to try it know that there are going to be bugs. So use it at your own risk.

Download weave here: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/weave/

Further reading: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/

¹ I will soon make a big article on cloud computers and how they are going to work.

~ by Tristan on July 2, 2008.