Hopefully if you're reading my blog in a web browser you're using Firefox (and if you aren't you really should be).  If you haven't been reading the tech press today let me clue you in - today is Firefox 3.0 day.

I've been playing with the Firefox 3.0 betas and release candidates for a few months now getting ready for the upgrade to 3.0.  I've found them to be fast, stable and very feature rich.  One of the main issues with older versions of Firefox was memory usage - if you left it open for long periods of time (I generally leave it running for days if not weeks) with lots of tabs open (I generally have between 8-20 tabs at any moment) it would eat memory like a fat southern guy at an all you can eat BBQ buffet.  That is to say a lot, in the hundred of megs of memory (I've seen as high as 800MB).  Firefox 3.0 is supposed to fix all that.

There is however one huge problem with Firefox 3.0 - Google Browser Sync support has been discontinued.  For some reason Google has decided not to update the extension for FF3 and is going to discontinue support for the entire app at the end of this year.  To say this sucks is an understatement.  If you're not familiar with Google Browser Sync let me explain - it is easily the best, most useful extension ever written for Firefox.

What GBS does it take just about everything about your browser (bookmarks, cookies, saved usernames/passwords, history, etc), encrypt it and transfer that data to Google's servers.  Then any other machine you're on (regardless of the OS) now has all your browser data available.  This is huge if you use more than one machine - no matter what machine I use my browser is the same.  If I register for a site on one (and save my password) that information is synced across all my other computers.  Once you get used to this you can't live without it.  Well I guess I'm going to have to.

I haven't yet downgraded to FF2 but I probably will as this is already driving me crazy (after only 10 minutes).  My sincere hope is that Google will come to its senses, update the app and continue to support it long term.  Hopefully there will be a big enough back lash in the blogger community that they will be forced to.