I'm starting to lose trust and confidence in Firefox. What has happened over at Mozilla to turn what was once the "standard browser" of technology-savvy people everywhere, into the browser that's always letting me down?

It started with the ocassional crash. I remember feeling kind of shocked the first time I saw Firefox 2 crash. After a number of years of being reliable and stable, there it was - falling flat on its face. Over time, as the crashing happened again and again, I was less shocked.

Firefox has gone through a number of security and stability upgrades. From 2.0.0.0  to 2.0.0.1 and on and on. Firefox automatically updates for me whenever a new stable release is pushed out by the developers.

But how did 2.0.0.8 slip out?

I started Firefox today, and noticed for the first time on a particularly ad-filled web site that for some reason Adblock wasn't blocking any ads. I opened the extension tab and saw this:

All of my extensions are broken. Restarting Firefox didn't fix it.

According to the official bug report which was filed TWO MONTHS AGO, developers are still trying to figure out how to fix it. Downloading the latest browser (2.0.0.9) or even one of the development builds won't do it.

Open source is supposed to be better than closed source right? Bugs are found and fixed in 24 hours, or so the story goes. I consider this to be a serious problem - all of my extensions no longer work. And as far as I can tell, this bug has been known for 2 months now. All-in-all, it's a huge knock to the reputation of the supposedly "stable and less bugs" browser. That myth has just been shattered, although truth be told it's been in jeopardy for some time.