As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.
One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services.
We’re now launching a new project within Mozilla Labs to formally explore this integration. This project will be known as Weave and it will focus on finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.
Just like Mozilla enables massive innovation by making Firefox open on many levels, we will aim to do the same with Weave by developing an open extensible framework for services integration.
Organizing Principles
We’ve set out some basic organizing principles to help frame the approach that we’re going to explore. We will:
- provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
- ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
- provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
- respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
- leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
- build a extensible architecture like Firefox
Overview of the Idea
- browser metadata is pushed into the cloud (e.g. bookmarks, history, customizations, etc.)
- this metadata is transparently reflected everywhere an individual gets online
- we provide a basic framework for easily sharing and delegating access to this metadata to friends, family and third-parties
- we build tools and APIs to extend this framework and to provide new user experiences
Use Cases
We’ve also developed some initial use cases that we’ll be exploring with Weave. To be clear, it’s not Mozilla’s intent to provide robust applications for, say, travel planning. We intend to provide the infrastructure and an consistent model for how a user can open up their browser metadata to friends and third-party applications. These use cases are just examples of the types of things we would like to explore, and have others build applications on top of.
Initial Roadmap
- Weave 0.1 (December 21, 2007)
- basic framework and server-side in place for testing and experimentation
- authentication with a single online service provider (e.g. labs.mozilla.com)
- bookmark and history synchronization to the server from multiple clients
- default encryption of all user data with a placeholder algorithm
Weave 0.2 (Early 2008)
- initial Web service APIs for developers to build on
- user controls and ability to delegate (and revoke) access rights to specific bits of browser metadata
- UI to enable sharing on applicable interfaces
Get Weave
- Install Weave v0.1 for Firefox 3.0b2pre or greater, Windows/Mac/Linux
Warning: This is an early prototype. Use at your own risk.
How to Get Involved
We’ll be rolling out prototypes of various components of the framework, gathering feedback and hosting a series of discussions and sessions on the Mozilla Labs site to plan, design, and further develop Weave.
- Discuss, debate and add to the design in the Weave forum.
- Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org.
Tags: weave
Got this link from Google Browser Sync. Wanted to try it out. Also can someone tell me if Mozilla is available for Symbian mobiles yet?
Krishna from keepwrite.com
[...] Mozbackup passwords, bookmarks, add-ons, plugins and the like. It’s all anyone can do until Weave is up and running [...]
[...] Comment on Introducing Weave by Neil Phillips’ blog » moving home Mozbackup passwords, bookmarks, add-ons, plugins and the like. It’s all anyone can do until Weave is up and running [...] [...]
[...] faisait un petit moment que j’entendais parler de l’extension mozilla labs weave, le système de synchronisation de profils firefox. Et c’est tout à fait par hasard que [...]
[...] informa Alex sobre un nuevo proyecto de la fundación Mozilla: se llama Weave, conceptualmente es una nube de metadatos (marcadores, historial de navegación, configuraciones, [...]
Mozilla weave is great BUT there’s a fundamental feature that it’s lacking of:
KEEP THE LIST OF THE USER’S EXTENSIONS ON THE SERVER SIDE AS WELL!!!
Whenever the user logs in, all its missing extensions are proposed to be installed, right here, right now.
Firefox 3.0.5 crash when Weave 0.2.7 is enable. Disable it if you use 3.0.5
Confirmed what Tiago is saying, getting segmentation fault when attempting to start Firefox 3.0.5 with Weave 0.2.7.
[...] Weave is a Mozilla Labs’ project to develop a coherent framework and platform for deeply integrating online services with the browser. Our goals are to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over their personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences. [...]
I just wnat to know which license Weave is distributed?
Pardon me if this has been mentioned before:
I use two Firefox instances: one for my work activities, and one for personal. I use them both on the same computer, but I do want to keep them separate. I’d like Weave to understand and respect that, so I can have not just “My Firefox” but “My Personal Firefox” and “My Work Firefox”. As an extension of this, it’d be nice to be able to selectively carry e.g. bookmark folders across the two.
I am fan of Opera, I think Firefox should support Notes as Opera, Notes in Opera can sync so user can use everywhere.
@guillaume: The FEBE Firefox extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109) has functionality to address exactly the issue you raise — it claims to “actually rebuild your extensions individually into installable .xpi files. Now you can easily synchronize your office and home browsers.” (From the summary at addons.mozilla.org.)
I’ve been using FEBE for general profile-backup purposes for a month or so, but haven’t personally tried out the extension-management functionality… sounds worth looking into if you need to keep multiple browser installations in extension-sync, though.
As for selectively syncing various folders of bookmarks, Foxmarks added that functionality at some point not too long ago — they call it “Sync Profiles”. You can (for example) define profiles for “Work” and “Home” browsers, and designate bookmarks folders that should not (or should only) be sync’d for different profiles.
I’ve been using Foxmarks for a VERY long time, and it would be hard to overstate how awesome I think it is. I originally installed back in the days of the Firefox 1.5 -> 2.0 journey, to protect against that annoying bug where Ffox occasionally just blanked a profile’s personal/historical data w/o warning — I was tired of losing my bookmarks and just wanted them archived somewhere outside the browser! The fact that it became my ONE consolidated bookmark set, and was always the SAME no matter which computer I was on or what OS I was booted into… actually that was just an added bonus. (But quickly made it painfully obvious how much time and effort I’d been wasting before, storing things locally — the POINT of a bookmark is to have some page readily & quickly available if I need it again. Which it really isn’t when there’s a good chance I’ll be in another browser instance.)
Plus there are times — not very often, maybe once every couple of months or so — I’ll find myself somewhere random mentioning this great page I’d seen, or someone will be looking for info that I know I found on an obscure site. Conversations that invariably used to end, “Yeah, I know I bookmarked it… I’ll try and remember to send you the link when I get home.” (Hah.) Now, it’s just “here, I’ll pull it up for you”… a quick trip to my.foxmarks.com from anywhere == instant gratification.
I’m not saying Foxmarks itself is perfect. (And no, I don’t work there.) It’s had hiccups, and there are valid reasons for some people to have privacy concerns or need richer functionality. (My own needs aren’t too demanding: I signed up on 2006-05-28, looks like, and almost 3 years later I’m only at revision 448.) My bookmarks also aren’t closely-guarded state secrets, it took me all of maybe 3 minutes to decide that it really didn’t matter where my bookmarks might be spread… not even the couple of URLs I stored with authentication data embedded, for various reasons. *shrug*
(That was back when installing Foxmarks automatically meant everything was exposed, it’s nice to know that now certain things can be protected w/ profiles… I still haven’t bothered, tho.)
When I saw that there was a plugin for syncing to Google Bookmarks, I figured THAT would eventually eclipse Foxmarks — I went with Foxmarks initially only because at the time it was really the only option. I’m as surprised as anyone that I accidentally picked the right horse.
History syncing would still be nice, sure… Weave and Google Bookmarks both looked like promising candidates to take syncing to the next level and make it more extensive, robust, and intelligent. But everybody trying to do full-history syncing is apparently finding it real hard to do right, and do well… or really at all. Foxmarks doesn’t do a LOT, but it does it in a pretty much invisible, automatic, and intuitive way that actually proves ASTONISHINGLY useful as a result.
Whoops, neglected to mention that second part of my response was actually directed @Don Dwiggins.
Anyone else unable to sign in to the service? I haven’t been able to connect for awhile now, and it reports an invalid username and/or password, even though I am 100% certain that the ones I am using are correct.
I’m afraid in my case Weave is a total failure.
I installed Firefox 3.1b2 and the current Weave on XP and Mac OS. The Mac is new, and I hadn’t bookmarked anything there. The XP is “mature”, and had a lot of bookmarks.
I enabled only bookmarks, and did an initial sync on both machines. The bookmarks from the XP machine transferred to my Macbook, and all seemed well.
I then proceeded to start organizing my bookmarks on XP (remember, it is “mature” – a lot of old and un-categorized bookmarks). Bookmarks I moved seem to have been transferred OK. But ones that I deleted were not always deleted on the Mac. Some were, some weren’t.
However, something else much more serious has occurred. I have a recursive mess! I previously had nothing under “unsorted bookmarks” on both machines. I’ve always added new uncategorized bookmarks in the main bookmark menu. I dunno at what Firefox version “unsorted bookmarks” appeared, but I’ve never used it, and my browser has always defaulted to adding bookmarks to the main menu.
Now, I have a second copy of all of my bookmarks (from the very top level “All Bookmarks” down) under “unsorted bookmarks”. And…. at the bottom of that, yet another copy of all of my bookmarks under another “unsorted bookmarks” entry. Ad infinitum. Well, I don’t really know if it is ad-infinitum, because I don’t have the patience to drill-down and see how far it goes.
But it looks to me like it’s turtles all the way down.
I think it’s best to revert to Firefox 3.06 (or 3.07) and recover my bookmarks from backup media. Not useful, and quite scary at this point. Disappointing, to say the least, at a point after more than a year of development.
Hey, I know it’s beta, alpha, or less, but…
Ugh, now I’m confused where my bookmarks are or how I’m going to get them back the way they were. My bookmarks.html is dated 1/4/2009, and backup dated 1/4/2009. So this is not where they are. There’s a bookmarkbackups directory in my profile, and that has an html file from 1/4/2009, and several json files with various dates up to the present. The json files are all around the same size, so no apparent growth.
I’m guessing, then, that my bookmark file is not actually growing, but that this is some sort of bug that makes the display code recursively display the bookmark directory structure endlessly.
But where the heck are my bookmarks kept? Is the bookmark file no longer used once you are using Weave?
It may be helpful to know how I have my bookmarks organized. Most of them live in the Bookmarks Toolbar. I have about 10 folders there, some of them with many subfolders. I put new bookmarks in the main bookmark menu, and eventually move them to to toolbar folders. As I said, I NEVER use “unsorted bookmarks”.
Is the Weave project dead? I haven’t seen an update in a long time.
Welcome to the Cloud…
I miss Weave updates…
Hmm I wonder where Google got there ‘Wave’ service idea from