Easily share Firefox bookmarks across computers with Mozilla Weave

Ever been browsing the Internet at work or at a friend's and wished you had your bookmarks with you so you look up the URL of that site you can't remember?

Now you can.

A new Firefox plugin from the folks at Mozilla, known as Mozilla Weave Sync, allows users of the latest incarnation of the browser to easily and securely share their bookmarks, tabs/browsing history, settings, and even saved passwords across different computers.

Installing the plugin is a cinch; getting set up is only slightly more difficult.

To install, head over to Mozilla's Add-Ons site and click the big green button. Firefox will need to be restarted. Once it comes back up, click on the little chain rectangle in the bottom right corner of the browser (on the status bar).

The Mozilla Weave wizard should appear. Clicking Get Started with Weave (the first big blue button) will initialize the process for creating an account.

To protect user information, Mozilla not only requires a username and password, but a more complex passphrase as well. These credentials will need to be entered on each computer that shares Firefox bookmarks and browsing history. (Mozilla also encrypts information that is shared, to protect user privacy).

After completing the wizard, Weave will do an initial sync of whatever information is selected by the user to be shared (users can opt to only share bookmarks, for example) to Mozilla's servers.

The next step is to install Weave on a second computer running Firefox. (As long as Weave has been installed on and synced from the first computer, it's not necessary to have access to that machine to grab bookmarks to the second one). After Weave is installed on Computer No. 2, it's time to go through the wizard again, except this time, Set Up Another Computer is the option to choose.

The wizard will sync the second installation of Firefox with the first. All of the first computer's bookmarks should be downloaded, as well as whatever other information a user has opted to share.

Folks who don't want to share their bookmarks and browsing history with other people should (obviously) not install and use Weave on an installation of Firefox running in a shared environment. Those who serve as tech help gurus or computer administrators for friends or relatives should consider setting up their own accounts on such machines for when they do their own browsing.

(Firefox creates separate user profiles for each account on a machine, so it's safe to sync when logged in to one's own account.)

Weave is a pretty cool piece of technology, and once again demonstrates that Mozilla is leading the pack in the field of web browser innovation.