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Firefox + Google Mobile Add-On = Mobile Joy + Broken Browser

Google made a new add-on available to Firefox users in the U.S. today. After it is installed, it allows you to highlight any text in your browser and send it as a text message to your mobile phone. This would be very useful if it didn't break Firefox.

The new service is called Google Send To Phone, and can be found here. It is a Firefox add-on and must be downloaded and installed. You have to restart Firefox in order to get it working. Once you do, the basic functionality is a small little icon of a phone next to the Google search bar in your browser. The whole idea here is to be able to send yourself text messages of snippets of text, or URLs, etc., directly from your browser.

After I installed it, I gave it a test run. Too bad it sent Firefox up in flames.

The first thing it does is disable the cut-and-paste function of your PC. I was unable to cut-and-paste new information into my clipboard. This renders the entire add-on pretty useless from the get-go. Even so, I plowed forward. I hit the little phone icon and it pops open a window. In that window, you add your cell number, your carrier, and any subject information you want. Then I pasted in whatever was the last thing I cut-and-pasted before installing the add-on. It appeared in the window. I hit the send button, and less than 10 seconds later, the text appeared in an SMS on my phone. Cool.

What's not cool is that it basically renders your browser useless. The address bar itself no longer works. I typed an address, hit enter, and watched as my browser went nowhere. I re-typed, hit enter again, same result. The only way I was able to get to a new Web site was to use a hyperlink. Even then, after the page loads, the address bar reads whatever was last typed in there. I had the InformationWeek home site loaded on my screen, but the address bar said "CNN.com". Um, what's going on here?

I am running version 2.0.0.14 of Firefox. I tried re-performing this entire experiment on another machine with a different version of Firefox, and met the same results. In the end, I had to disable the add-on and restart my browser to get Firefox working properly again.

Google, you might want to take a look at what's going on here...

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