By Ryan Paul
July 02, 2008 - 08:50PM CT

Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Weave 0.2, the third major release of its experimental Firefox synchronization add-on. This version brings a broader feature set, improved reliability, and streamlined notification support. Although it is still in the early testing stage, Weave is already effective and easy to use.

When Mozilla launched Weave in December, the add-on offered basic support for storing the user's Firefox bookmarks and history in the cloud, allowing the synchronization of the data between computers. The latest version extends this functionality to also cover cookies, passwords, tabs, and form contents.

Future versions will go further and also support synchronizing the user's extensions, themes, and search plugins. Mozilla intends to eventually implement an API that will enable third-party Firefox extensions to leverage Weave's synchronization capabilities for other kinds of user data. The new version is a lot more polished than previous releases.

The installation process is reasonably intuitive and requires very little configuration. After a user installs the Weave extension from the services.mozilla.com web site and restarts their browser, Weave will launch automatically and present a registration wizard. The registration process—which requires users to select a username, password, and encryption key—is finished in only a few steps.