Some of us, maybe most of us, are daily using several computers.
At the office, we can have a workstation and/or server and/or a laptop and/or a mobile device such as Smartphone and PDA.
At home, we can find the family computer and/or dad or mum laptop and/or kids’ computers and or private mobile devices (PDA, Smartphone, iPod Touch, etc).
On each machine, we browse the web and store bookmarks, session login/password, cookies and navigation history. The navigation information is scattered everywhere, often with some duplication.
We have various tools available on line proposing us to save our bookmarks or favorites and adding some tags to easily retrieve them.
Some famous one are del.icio.us or digg with in addition the community sharing aspect. But you can still have duplicates of these bookmarks locally within your preferred web browser and only bookmarks are stored.
Google had a time attempted to propose a solution to remedy this with Google Browser Sync, as a plug-in for Firefox available at Google Labs. However, since Firefox 3, Google stops its developments. Google has made available a few days ago the source code for this extension if you want to pursuit the adventure.
Microsoft, at this time, proposes a technical preview of the same type of global synchronization platform on a dedicated MS website. Its solution named is Live Mesh and as usual, they take care of the “look & feel” of the application in a Vista spirit.
Apple has already announced its own synchro platform MobileMe. It will be launched with iPhone 3G release on July 11 2008. It will be available for Mac OS, Windows and iPhone/iPod Touch OS. However, without offering support for bookmarks, session login/password, cookies and history navigation synchronization. The former platform .Mac was proposing at least the bookmarks synchro. We’ll see maybe a “MobileMe v2″ incorporating these features at the WW Apple conference in January 2009.
The Mozilla Foundation also offers its open source alternative on the name of Weave as a Firefox add-on too. The version 0.2 of Wease has been just been released. I’m wondering if my good friend ChAP has already downloaded and tested it…
source: Mozilla Labs
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