As you know, we’ve been following Mozilla’s Weave Sync project for a long time. Last week, the Weave Sync add-on for Firefox was made available. Installable as an extension for Firefox, Weave is way to synchronize bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history and open browser tabs across multiple browsers and computers.
Now Mozilla Labs is hoping that developers will adopt Weave Sync and build upon the service using a set of Weave Sync and User APIs. Mozilla is launching a whole range of developer resources that also include Python & Javascript client libraries.
The idea behind this effort is “to increase the number of places where you can securely access, and have your personal data readily available to you, independent of whether or not Firefox is available,” Mozilla notes on its blog. In other words, developers can use Weave Sync services in new products independent of Firefox and thus build new apps-based that leverage our browser & browsing specific data.
This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments. Future APIs will provide third-party web sites and applications the ability to request permission and obtain explicit access only to specific user data to augment a users’ Web experience, e.g. providing personalized recommendations based upon a user’s bookmarks or search history.
Mozilla has also released a couple of experimental clients such as the web-based Weave Client, an iPhone Weave Client, a WebOS Weave Client and a command line Weave client. Mozilla Weave has been over two years in the making. I first wrote about it in 2007
Nice and all. And I guess its good that Mozilla is pushing this for other developers to build upon this framework. However XMarks has been out for years, and has already become the standard for syncing bookmarks, passwords, etc. Where is the motivation for the user to switch?
There is no etc for xmarks; that’s the motivation for weave, which already syncs much more than xmarks does and has the potential to do much more than sync in the future.
That said, xmarks is cross-brower compatible, which weave is not, as of yet, so for now I’ll continue to use xmarks.
Google Chrome v.4 already does this, no plugin or extension necessary for it either.
@Some Guy
I switched out from XMarks immediately because their software feels like malware. I don’t know if it has malware inside but surely it user experience indicates that something weird is happeing under the hood.
@jp
I don’t think Xmarks is malware. Have been using it forever and it seems to be doing a good job of it. I actually did write about Xmarks earlier. Check out that post. http://bit.ly/2l3Dnm
only Opera did it ages ago, like everything else, they never get the credit 🙂
That’s because Opera sucks. 🙂