Smoothwall Firewall project

Saturday 25 July 2009

Mozilla Labs Weave project is really taking shape

What is it? A bolt on to firefox to store your bookmarks and other browser data in the cloud.

I have used a few of these cloud based bookmark systems in the past, with varying degrees of success, and I have just started testing the Mozilla labs Weave system and it is working very well indeed. I have it talking on three separate systems, including one virtual image and they are syncing perfectly. It means I no longer have to have a different set of bookmarks on different machines, which is not very cloud freindly. The performance is the best I have experienced, and it really happens in the background without you noticing. You can select what parts of your locally stored data you wish to send in to the cloud with a bolt onto the Firefox (3.5 is required) options/preferences window. I like the fact you can encrypt locally and then send the data.



It would be great and extremely useful if it opens its doors eventually to other browsers like Chromium and Opera, and hopefully this will happen. As they are all open source the opportunities are more obvious that with a closed source product like IE.

I think we will start to see a lot more tools and utilities like this moving forward as the cloud becomes the storage system of choice for your information. The data you send to the Mozilla servers is whatever you choose from the list of options, and it is encrypted with a passphrase only you know, so there can't be any data mining without you knowing it. Security is always key in the cloud and can not be ignored, so I think this system works well.

I would definitely recommend giving it a go.

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