Mozilla Weave

I’ve been a fan for sometime of Xmarks (aka Foxmarks), which allows you to synchronise your bookmarks and, more recently, your passwords across different computers. I use it exclusively on Firefox but it is also compatible with other browsers as well.

However, I’m a little bit excited by Mozilla Weave – this is Mozilla’s version of, well, the same idea. It’s Open Source though and currently available as a Beta release. For this reason I haven’t replaced XMarks with it, but after a “quick go” with it, I’m more than a little impressed.

Weave will run silently in the background synchronising much more than Xmarks does and, more importantly, it does it without affecting your browser session. I have such automatic updates switched off with Xmarks because it causes my Firefox to grind to a halt. This might have something to do with my thousands of bookmarks. Even a manual sync takes some time¹. Weave, in comparison, was unnoticeable and, when running it’s initial sync, you can continue browsing without any issues.

The one thing that Xmarks has over Weave is the ability to view bookmarks online but, to be honest, that’s not a facility I use. More recently they’ve been adding more and more features, away from the basic synchronising, probably to differentiate between itself and Weave (which was announced some time ago). However, none of these have been of interest, so I’ve simply switched them off.

If it continues to impress as it has already, I’m looking forward to the first non-beta release. Sorry, XMarks.

1. although I have noticed that this has got better recently [↩]