Delicious, previously “del.icio.us”, has pretty much established a solid position in the social bookmarking market. Unfortunately, the company has dropped the bomb with their latest extension for Firefox 3. The Delicious blog is quickly filling with many discouraging comments. The plugin renders Firefox 3 useless at times, and, as expected, has upset many users.

There are quite a few problems, but here is a basic rundown of what I have noticed when the extension is enabled:

• Firefox becomes unstable, and, at times, slow to respond.
• When specifying a folder to store bookmarks in with the built-in bookmarking system, the bookmark, instead, is placed at the end of the default bookmarks menu.
• Using the built-in bookmark manager for Firefox becomes a difficult task as it will occasionally cause the browser to hang. On several occasions the browser has crashed while trying to edit the Firefox 3 bookmarks.
• After installation, the browser crashed twice in a row while starting up. I haven’t been able to replicate this, but I now believe the Delicious extension was involved. (Perhaps it isn’t playing nicely with other extensions?)

Essentially, it is not making Delicious seem like such a good option at the moment. Other services like Ma.gnolia, Twine, FoxMarks, Furl, and Netvouz might take advantage of the opportunity. This might not be a bad thing either. I’d love to see some more competition within the social bookmarking arena.

Delicious has a preview version which is significantly improved, but they have yet to release it. I think they might actually consider doing just that with these recent events quite possibly leaving a bad taste in users’ mouths.

Ironically, I was already considering a switch to another service. Maybe this is simply confirmation that my consideration is justified.

Delicious, it is time to get the extension fixed before you upset far too many, but, then again, the damage has already been done.

Update: Stephen Hood, Director & Product Management of Delicious, has brought to my attention that a new version of the Delicious extension (v2.0.64) is available for download on Mozilla’s Firefox Add-ons site. Stephen says that the update fixes many reported issues. I will evaluate it once I get some spare time.