We are excited to announce the first Beta release of the Weave Sync add-on. You can download it here. Once you have installed and connected, Weave Sync enables you to take your Firefox experience with you on your laptop, desktop and mobile devices.

This release marks a significant step towards making Weave Sync a production quality add-on. With this Beta release, we have tried to make Weave Sync:

• Faster – using heuristics, Weave Sync computes an interestingness score to get you the most relevant data first. We have more details below.
• Simpler – a user interface that allows regular users to get up and running in a matter of minutes, while being flexible to accommodate advanced users.
• Unobtrusive – once it has been setup, Weave Sync works mostly in the background and when your computer is idle, without interrupting your regular Firefox experience.

New to Weave Sync?

Check out the Getting Started section on the project page that describes what this addon is all about. You will also find links to help you get up and running quickly.

Currently using Weave Sync?

In case you didn’t catch our blog post from a week ago, we would like to reiterate the following to ensure a smooth upgrade.

• 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 Weave Sync on multiple computers, you will need to upgrade to the 1.0 version on all of them to get sync functionality working correctly.
• The 1.0 beta sync add-on includes the incremental sync behavior. This helps in two ways:
  • 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.
  • 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 Sync basically stores that “frecency” value with the encrypted history data on the server, so 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.

Also, please be sure to check the release notes for any known issues. We also have a list of Frequently Asked Questions that might be helpful.

If you believe you have discovered a bug, please use the Filing Bugs link that provides easy instructions to file bugs.

And as always, if you have any questions/comments/feedback, please let us know on the forums.

One final point: If you have been using the auto-login features,  you can download an early pre-alpha version here. We intend to develop it rapidly and have a bunch of new ideas/features lined up. See the wiki page for more details.

– Ragavan Srinivasan, on behalf of the Weave team

Tags: announcement, sync, weave