If you have been using the Weave sync add-on these past few months, you have seen a lot of changes. All of these have been leading up to us getting ready to release a version 1.0.

Next week, we expect to be able to release the first beta of the Weave sync add-on. To help you prepare for this release, we wanted to share some details on what to expect:

* When you install the 1.0 beta sync add-on, all of your firefox and fennec instances will do a fresh upload of all your data. For the majority of our users, this should happen in a transparent manner. However, if you are using the Weave servers primarily as a back-up and do not have your data anywhere else, you should ensure you have at least one local copy before upgrading to 1.0 beta.

* If you are using the sync add-on on multiple computers, you will need to upgrade to the 1.0 version on all of them to get sync functionality working correctly.

* If you have been using the auto-login features, you may have noticed them missing already starting with the 0.8 version. The weave sync 1.0 beta add-on will only have synchronization related functionality. The auto login feature is *not* dead. It is simply being moved into its own add-on. We hope to be able to release an early pre-alpha version soon (in a week or so). We fully intend to develop it rapidly and have a bunch of new ideas/features lined up. See the wiki page for more details.

* The 1.0 beta sync add-on includes the incremental sync behavior. This helps in two ways:

1. Your data will be synchronized in chunks to improve performance. Among other things, it ensures that you can continue to use firefox normally even when you are syncing hundreds of bookmarks in the background. That said, if you have a lot of data, it could take some time for all of it to be synchronized. Do not panic if you do not see all of your data immediately. Depending on the type of computer you have and the amount of data you have, this could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

2.  Your data will be synchronized based on “Interestingness”. “Interestingness” is related to how the AwesomeBar works in Firefox where pages that you frequently and recently visit show up higher in the location bar results. Weave basically stores that “frecency” value with the encrypted history data on the server, so Weave clients can ask the server for the most interesting items first. For other data like bookmarks, frecency is combined with where the bookmark is shown, so items visible in the Bookmarks Toolbar are ranked as “more important.”

* Finally, if you are hosting your own weave server, you’ll need to add an apache alias line for the 1.0 URL – your old server will still handle the same API.

The weave team will be watching our servers and the forums very closely during and after the release to ensure everything happens smoothly. We are really excited about getting to this major milestone and look forward to building an awesome product for you.

As always, let us know if you have any questions/comments on the forums.

– Ragavan Srinivasan, on behalf of the Weave team

Tags: announcement, sync, weave