We’ve been using Mozilla’s Weave extension/platform for some time now and the team, today, launched Weave version 0.7. Nothing major to report in this release, just some performance and UI improvements. However, Mozilla’s always had plans to enable the synchronization of your many different Firefox add-ons. I suspect that’ll be something that comes with the release of 1.0 but who knows what 0.8 or 0.9 will bring…

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Weave 0.3, Mozilla’s browser information synchronization architecture (which we’ve previously covered), has officially been released.

With Weave, you can synchronize your browser’s bookmarks, browsing history, passwords as well as any tabs that you might have open across any of your PCs – safely and securely. Here’s Mozilla’s official project description:

“Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser.”

Along with the 0.3 release, Mozilla is now officially supporting Fennec; Mozilla’s own mobile browser. Eventually, at least according to the project roadmap, Weave will enable you to synchronize your browser preferences and add-ons (read: extensions) in addition to all of the aforementioned items.

Give it a try by downloading from the official Mozilla add-ons site: Weave 0.3. Or, check out the official Weave project site at http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/weave/.

Do note, however, that the 0.3 release requires Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 or greater… which is still in a testing phase. (Hence the “beta” label.) Plus, if you do decide to g’head and upgrade your version of Firefox in order to take a peek at Weave, some of your other add-ons might very well break in the process. A great number of mine did.

Lifehacker today pointed to an add-on (it’s hard not to call it an extension) for Firefox by the name of Drag & DropZones that can help rid yourself of some unnecessary right-clicking when it comes to searching, saving images, opening links in new tabs/windows and, basically, anything you can do via a context menu in Firefox.

How does it work? Start to drag a link or an image and “drop zones” instantly appear. Each drop zone represents a different command and dragging the link or image onto the drop zone activates that particular command. The zones are completely customizable and you can modify the color, transparency and location of each drop zone that you’ve enabled.

If the concept sounds vaguely familiar, there’s a good chance you’re thinking of a couple of other add-ons that have been around for a while longer: Super DragAndGo and Easy DragToGo. Those particular add-ons enable you to quickly drag a link downward to open it in a new background tab or upward to open in a new focused tab… in addition to enabling you to quickly drag an image to save it to a default location. (Note: if you have Easy DragToGo installed, Drag & DropZones’s functionality will render Easy DragToGo useless. The two, apparently, cannot coexist.)

Source: Lifehacker via Webware

Since Firefox 3 was first released to the public in alpha status, many have enjoyed the new bookmark tagging feature which allows you to not only bookmark your favorite sites but also organize them using tags like many modern online bookmarking services.  In fact, this new feature has even given people the desire to migrate their existing data from the del.icio.us bookmarking service into Firefox.

Delicious allows you to export your bookmarks to an HTML file and while the file does include your various tags, Firefox 3 does not allow tags to be imported via an HTML file.  Instead, the browser uses the .json data interchange format to deal with tags.  So, up until now, I’ve been able import my del.icio.us bookmarks into Firefox via HTML but the many different tags I’ve assigned using the del.icio.us service were NOT imported.

Fortunately, the latest release of Flock, the social browser we’ve covered before, can act as a transition tool to allow for the type of import you want.  Flock, by default, automatically merges del.icio.us bookmarks with your own local bookmarks (including tags) when you engage one of Flock’s "social" features and login to the Delicious service.

Now, as you may have read, the Flock 2.0 beta was released today.  This release finally uses the Firefox 3 code-base thus enabling Flock to use the same bookmarking system (for the most part) as Firefox.  So, if you enable the Delicious service from within Flock 2.0, you can then export your bookmarks to a .json file once Flock has finished integrating them with your local bookmarks.  (Note, this can take more than a few hours depending on the amount of bookmarks you have stored on the del.icio.us service.)  To do this, open up the Favorites Library by going to Favorites > Organize Bookmarks from within Flock 2.0.  (You’ll notice an interface similar to that of the Firefox 3 bookmarks library.)

From there, select the "Import and Backup" option from the main menu and save the .json file to any directory you’d like.

Now, open up Firefox 3 and head over to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks.  From the main menu, select Import & Backup > Restore > File:

Find the .json file in your file explorer and import the contents.  Once Firefox is finished importing your bookmarks, the tags section over in the navigation area will now contain the entire list of tags you’ve created/assigned through del.icio.us:

Now, normally in Firefox 3 or Flock, you could click on one of those tags and any bookmarks related to that tag would then be displayed over in the left-hand side.  What’s strange, and something I’ve yet to figure out, is that the bookmarks DON’T display in the area on the left when selecting a tag in the nav area.  However, when you type in a tag or a keyword relating to a site you’ve bookmarked from inside the location bar (a.k.a. "awesomebar" or "address bar") in the main Firefox window, the appropriate results display:

Regardless, your favorite sites are now discoverable from within Firefox even if the situation isn’t 100% conventional.  You should also note that, with this scenario, an HTML export of your bookmarks from within Firefox doesn’t perform properly.  A .json export and restore (like we did above) does, however, work properly but you end up with the exact same result…no visible bookmarks in the Bookmarks Manager.

Anyway, it’s a temporary solution if you’re wanting to migrate your data.  If you have any other suggestions or solutions, feel free to contact us (suggest *at* fansoftech *dot* com) or drop a comment below.

Update: the fine individuals at e-accent.com have created a site dedicated to this very idea: http://delicious.e-accent.com.

Basically, you backup your current bookmarks from Firefox (to the .json format.)  Then, you export your current bookmarks from http://del.icio.us (with tags).  Once you have those two files, you can merge them together with e-accent’s tool and the site will generate a .json file that you simply import into Firefox 3.

It worked like a charm for me but I did notice that I needed to un-check the "notes" option when exporting from the Delicious site in order for the e-accent tool to generate a proper merged .json file.  Now, I have all of my del.icio.us bookmarks WITH tags inside Firefox. 

I’ll now be using Mozilla’s Weave Firefox add-on to synchronize these bookmarks with my other machines.  I’m already using Weave to synchronize browser cookies and passwords so this conversion just allows me to rid myself of one extra extension that I have to keep up with when re-installing Firefox on any of my machines.

It’s been quite some time since Google updated the official "Google Browser Sync" Firefox extension.  If you’re unfamiliar with it, the extension enabled you to synchronize your browser bookmarks, history and passwords with any other computer on which you might be running Firefox.

Not only has it not been updated since 2006, the extension isn’t even compatible with the 3rd release of the Mozilla Firefox browser.  (As is typically the case with Google, mum’s the word on any plans and nearly 100 status requests have gone unanswered in the official forum for Google Firefox extensions.)

Mozilla answered the cries of many, however, when it released "Weave" late last year.  The official extension (from the company who brought you the Firefox browser itself) allowed for synchronization of your bookmarks, history and saved form data.  With the next release, they added support for cookies.

Now, with today’s release, they add support for passwords as well…thus leaving Google Browser Sync entirely useless.

The extension even allows for developers to extend Weave for their own applications but you can read more about that, and Weave’s many other features, on the Mozilla Labs blog. Or, you can just download it now: https://services.mozilla.com/.

Note: once you begin the initial synchronization, be prepared for the browser to choke just a little bit while the sync occurs.  Once you’re finished with that initial synchronization, however, it’ll be as smooth as silk to keep your browser information up-to-date on all your computers.

Now, if they only would allow for synchronization of Firefox extensions…