Mozilla Weave puts Firefox in the Cloud

Mozilla, the makers of the semi-ubiquitous web browser Firefox and the mail application Thunderbird, has announced Weave 0.2. Weave is an application that aims to make even your web browser itself a ‘cloud’ application.

The benefit of a ‘cloud’ application is that it allows for data to exist locally (on your computer) as well as remotely (on remote servers a.k.a in the cloud) to decentralize your important data. Anyone who’s ever had a laptop crash or get stolen or lost can appreciate the concept:

When Mozilla launched Weave in December, the add-on offered basic support for storing the user’s Firefox bookmarks and history in the cloud, allowing the synchronization of the data between computers. The latest version extends this functionality to also cover cookies, passwords, tabs, and form contents. Future versions will go further and also support synchronizing the user’s extensions, themes, and search plugins. Mozilla intends to eventually implement an API that will enable third-party Firefox extensions to leverage Weave’s synchronization capabilities for other kinds of user data.

All of the user data that is synchronized by Weave is stored in an encrypted JSON format on Mozilla’s servers via the WebDAV protocol. The synchronization and encryption logic is handled entirely client-side and the server does very little besides registration, authentication, and storage. This will make it easy for other providers to offer Weave storage services.

Also, this wouldn’t be the Age of 2.0 if there weren’t some kind of sharing aspects. This version of Weave also uses an elaborate key system that will make it possible for users to securely share their bookmarks. The future plans for Weave according to a discussion between Chris Beard and ArsTechnica is to have it act as a server side service with an API wrapped around to allow for third party mashups and other products that add functionality.