Browser Sync accross many machines

Question

Everyone remembers google browser sync right? I thought it was great. Unfortunately Google decided not to upgrade the service to Firefox 3.0. Mozilla is developing a replacement for google browser sync which will be a part of the Weave project. I have tried using Weave and found it to be very very slow or totally inoperable. Granted they are in a early development phase right now so I can not really complain.

This specific problem of browser sync got me to thinking though. What do all of you think of Mozilla or someone making a server/client package that we, the users, could run on your 'main' machine? Now you just have to know your own IP or have some way to announce it to your client browsers at work or wherever.

There are several problems I can think of with this: non static IPs, Opening up ports on your local comp etc. It just seems that Mozilla does not want to handle this traffic created by many people syncing their browsers. There is not a way for them to monetize this traffic since all the data uploaded must be encrypted.

Answer 1

Mozilla Weave is capable of running on personal servers. It uses WebDAV to communicate with HTTP servers and can be configured to connect to private servers. I've tried setting it up on my own servers but with no success (Mainly because I'm not very good at working with Apache to configure WebDAV)

I'm hoping Mozilla Weave eventually allows FTP access so I can easily use my server to host my firefox profile.

If you're interested in trying Mozilla Weave on a personal server, there's a tutorial here:
http://marios.tziortzis.com/page/blog/article/setting-up-mozilla-weave-on-your-server/

Answer 2

Browser Sync is up on Google Code now. Doesn't look like anything has been done with it yet though, as far as making it hosted on personal servers/computers.

Answer 3

I've been using the Firefox Scrapbook extension, sync'd via FolderShare. It takes a little setup, but the nice thing is that Scrapbook grabs a local copy of each page so it works offline or if the site goes away.

Answer 4

Not a complete solution to this problem, but I've found FoxMarks to be a really nice bookmark syncing extension.

Answer 5

I use two solutions for keeping my browsers in sync. The first uses Mozilla Weave to sync bookmarks, history, and general profile data to my own server. The 2nd solution uses Scrapbook and JungleDisk to synchronize my Scrapbook extension data:

http://eric-blue.com/2009/12/07/how-to-synchronize-your-digital-scrapbook/