Today I downloaded Firefox version 3.5. I knew it was coming, and I wanted to make sure my Twitter Toolbar was working correctly on it. It was. Then I decided to test out several of my sites to make sure nothing strange was happening. All worked as I expected, and everything appeared normal on others sites as well. Then I decided to check my Google AdWords account.

Google is Not Ready for Firefox?

Nope, Google was not ready. As I went to login to my AdWords account I got this pleasant little message from Google.

“Support for Firefox 3.5 is coming soon. Until then, please use an earlier version of Firefox when viewing the new interface.”

Nice. I’m surprised they didn’t suggest that I use Chrome instead. Google just got done building a new AdWords interface (released while FF 3.5 Beta was already available), and they didn’t see any issues coming? I’m not uninstalling Firefox so I guess I will be forced to use another browser. I was really surprised to see this from Google.

Upset a little that I couldn’t access my account, I decided to write this post about it. I went to my website to login. Then I noticed something strange. My Google Toolbar did not show the page rank for my site. I did the usually things to remove the error, but it wasn’t a refresh issue, it was a toolbar issue. The Google Toolbar was no longer working correctly, at least for the page rank. So I decided to use the toolbars help page to uninstall, and reinstall. Guess what? That didn’t work either.

Google is Big, But They Can’t Ignore Firefox

The developers of the Google Toolbar have clearly dropped the ball here. Firefox is no longer a little guy. It’s a major browser, supporting as much as 45% of the market share. I’m sure there are several excuses they could give, but the there is no denying Firefox’s beta was available to test your applications prior to this.

No major deal here I guess, I will assume again that Google will get their issues fixed. Maybe this would be  a good example of  “Why you should stick to known web standards”.

P.S. To Google: I wrote this using Firefox 3.5 on WordPress 2.8, and Bing works fine!

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