Firefox Sync (formerly known as Mozilla Weave) is being upgraded to version 1.4 this week, in preparation for inclusion into Firefox 4 later this year.
Sync is a browser bookmark/tab/history synchronization add-on for Firefox 3.6.x now, but the plan moving forward is to integrate it directly into Firefox 4.
With Firefox Sync 1.4, developers are trying to make UI better, by providing easily identifiable names for sync’ed browsers. Sure that sounds like a simple thing, but trust me, when you’ve got multiple machines it used to get real confusing really fast.
The other thing that I noticed after installing Firefox Sync 1.4 is how the setup and management has changed. With Sync 1.3 and its predecessors, there was a button at the bottom of the browser for setup and to access Sync. Now in 1.4 that button is gone (by default), which left me wondering what I was supposed to do.
Turns out the Sync menu/config is now all listed (by default) under the ‘Tools’ menu. Again a simple change and one that makes Sync a bit more integrated I suppose, though it was annoying to me personally on the first run after browser reboot.
Firefox Sync is also the key technology behind the Firefox Home app which Mozilla submitted this week to the Apple iPhone app store. It’s not clear to me if Firefox Home will be updated in lock-step with Firefox Sync, though seeing how the two products are so closely related, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a shared roadmap.
