Delicious Plugin Unstable—Users’ Response: “Disappointed”
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.
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Hi James –
We have been listening to the feedback and take it very seriously.
To provide some context, we launched our add-on last week when RC3 was the most current available version of Firefox 3.0. When the final release of Firefox 3.0 came out this week, it turned out to include a number of significant changes that broke aspects of the Delicious add-on.
We immediately got to work on fixes, and we have in fact just shipped an update that fixes many of the reported issues. This new version (2.0.64) has just been posted to Mozilla’s addons.mozilla.org site, and Firefox 3.0 should notify users shortly of the update.
Regarding your browser crashing on startup, we suspect another add-on may not be playing well with Delicious. If you have any more info you can provide about your set up and the other extensions you are using, we’d really appreciate that information so we can dig further.
Thanks for the feedback; we are working hard to make sure this add-on remains fast and reliable, and you should see a major improvement very shortly.
–Stephen Hood
June 19th, 2008 at 8:08 pmDirector, Product Management
Delicious
@Stephen
Thanks for your feedback Stephen. Had a nice lady from Delicious comment on an old post on my other blog about my review of the Delicious preview. At least you guys and gals handle the community aspect of your business very well.
Question: are there any plans for the Delicious preview version? I really like it, and I never had any problems with it.
I’m pretty confident that it has either been put on the back burner or there is still serious testing going on. My money is on the former.
Most of my reasons for wanting to switch would be rectified if I could use the Delicious extension with the preview version.
Anyways, I hope it is fixed, and I will check out the new version. I will also try to replicate my issue with Firefox crashing after installing the Delicious plugin.
Thanks for your time.
June 20th, 2008 at 7:35 am