I’m not sure how I stumbled onto it — I think I was reading something at Ars Technica and saw a link for this article about Mozilla Weave.  I never heard of it before — it sounded interesting.  After a month of heavy use, let me just say that it’s not just interesting — it’s downright, wicked cool.

Let me tell you my pattern — I use FireFox in two places: Work and at Home.  Many times I wish I stumble onto a site I want to read at home.  Usually I just save it to Diigo. But sometimes I forget.  The biggest annoyance is passwords. Yes, I save a ton of website passwords in FireFox.  But it stinks when I save it on the home machine but want to get into my account at work, and I can’t remember what password I used there.

Weave solves all these problems.  And ones that I didn’t know I even had.

So now when am I work, I don’t worry about saving an address to Diigo just so I can read it at home. Instead, I do nothing special.  When I go home, I start FireFox, I wait about 15 seconds and I see that it starts to sync. After that, I have all my history from my last session.  Yes, you read that.  All my history from my work browsing session.  Oh, and if I setup a web account during the day at work and save the passwords, that is synced too.  Preferences?  Check, but in a smart way. Like my proxy server config from the office is not moved to home.  That’s a good thing.  Bookmarks? Check. Yes, I still use bookmarks and I probably use them more now because they are synced between my machines.

A neat feature is tabs.  Yes, tabs are saved across browsing sessions on different machines.  So if I want to quickly see what I was looking at last night at home, I can go to History-> Tabs from other computers while at work.

Many of you may be thinking. “How is this different than the nasty FoxyMarks/XMarks crap?”  Well, not only does Mozilla not publish or track it but they also encrypt all data with a passphrase of your choosing. So, yeah, they thought of that too.  If you are truly paranoid you can setup your own Weave server.

So I think it’s worth a go, especially if you are still using FireFox instead of Chrome (which I still am on the fence about, but that’s another discussion.)