For over five years I’ve been using Firefox and writing Firefox add-ons. Due to the fact that I’ve been involved with writing add-ons (Something that I have just recently rid myself of), I’ve often been forced to upgrade to beta releases to get various add-ons ready for the production release. It’s never an ideal situation to be using a beta version (Apart from for testing purposes) of any software, but in the past beta versions of Firefox have been relatively stable… Till 3.6b1!
Since the introduction of Places in Firefox 3.0, things seem to be getting worse and worse. I suspect that many of the problems are being caused by SQLite being incapable of dealing (Quickly) with the demands that Firefox is placing on it. I was hoping that 3.6 would see many of these problems being addressed, but the old problems seem firmly entrenched, with additional problems being added to the old ones.
The 1st thing I noticed with 3.6b1 was that the Facebook fan box widget wasn’t working. This is no big deal, and on its own, didn’t bother me. I also noticed that, for some weird reason, tooltip text from underlying tabs would often be displayed on the uppermost tab. Also nothing serious, apart from being a bit confusing. Little problems which I assumed would be addressed in future beta releases.
A few days ago I upgraded to 3.6b5. Lo and behold, the problems are still there - Along with many others that I have since discovered.
While using 3.6b2 or 3.6b3 I noticed that Firefox’s autofill functionality would stop working after using the browser for a few hours. Simply restarting Firefox would fix the broken autofill functionality - Kinda reminds me of a certain operating system! But most worrying of all was when I discovered, when using 3.6b4, that using an add-on that opened a dialog would cause Firefox to abend… Hmmmmmm. Nothing special in the dialog; just a simple bit of XUL with a single password textbox, and it causes Firefox to abend? I was hoping to see 3.6b5 address these funnies, but no luck 
So what does the future hold for Firefox? Apart from the bugs, another very worrying situation is security. Firefox has always sold itself as being more secure than Internet Explorer, but is it? If the truth be told, I’m sure that Firefox is currently just as insecure as Internet Explorer ever was. Just as ActiveX components were the big security hole in Internet Explorer, so too have add-ons become the big security hole in Firefox. The really worrying thing about the security holes opened by Firefox add-ons is that even those who consider themselves to be security experts (Making recommendations to other add-on authors on how to secure their add-ons), don’t seem to realize that their recommendations are not foolproof.
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