Mozilla had to halt the distribution of the update to rush out an update to Firefox 7.0.1 two days later. User reports at the official Mozilla Support forum now suggest that the new version has a problem of its own. Firefox Sync, the synchronization service that Firefox users can utilize to sync passwords, bookmarks and other data appears to be broken in the new release.

Many users receive the message “Sync encountered an error while connecting: Service incorrectly configured. Please try again” when they try to sync or configure synchronization in Firefox 7.0.1. Users who try to delete their sync accounts or date cannot do so as well. They get error messages like “We had a problem purging the data from your account. Please try again later.” when trying to purge data and the following message when trying to delete the account.

Oh dear.

Looks like one of the dinosaurs escaped again.
We keep them away from the data, so that should be safe.

Please try again later when we’ve wrestled him back
onto the treadmill.

According to Tom’s Guide there are other issues that users reportedly experience under the latest stable version of the browser. These issue include Java incompatibilities, Yahoo Mail errors and incompatible toolbars.

Mozilla has acknowledged the issue on the Mozilla Services page stating that “Sync is currently having intermittent problems due to server overload. Services Operations is working on it”. The advice given on the page suggests that “warnings about incorrect passwords or Sync Keys are likely due to the load problems” and to “try syncing again at a later time”.

The Twitter feed indicates that Mozilla is working on the issue.

The Sync issues shed some new light on the delayed advertised update for Firefox 3.6 users to Firefox 7 that Mozilla decided to postpone yesterday. (thanks Venkat)

Update: Mozilla notes that users are currently having issues with Sync due to server overload issues.

The company was quick enough to provide a temporary solution for the bug that brought back all the add-ons for affected users. We covered the issue and workaround here in detail.

Firefox 7.01, the update that fixed the hidden add-on issue is now available for all users. It can be downloaded from the official website or via the web browser’s internal updating. To do that one would have to click on Firefox > Help > About Firefox to trigger the check for a new version of the Internet browser (assuming that the one button Firefox menu is the preferred layout).

This new Firefox release fixes only this single issue. Some users have questioned why Mozilla did not catch the bug in the Nightly or Aurora phase of development. While it is probably to easy to link the bug to the rapid release cycle, one has to consider the fact that the accelerated release process could have something to do with it.

Taking into consideration that this is the first major bug, and that the last two releases did not contain serious bugs that required an emergency patch, it is to early to tell if the rapid release process had any influence here.

Tech interested users and websites like mine will however look closely at the coming releases to see if history repeats itself, so to speak. I give Mozilla the benefit of the doubt and assume that a bug like this could have been missed before the rapid release cycle as well.

Please let me know what you make of it.

Update: Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client, has also been updated to version 7.0.1.

The bookmark folders and bookmarks were auto-collapsed and only a down arrow was shown at the right end of the toolbar that could be clicked on to access all the bookmarks that were placed in the Firefox toolbar.

The bookmarks would sometimes appear and shortly thereafter disappear again but were auto-collapsed for the majority of time. This changed once I discovered that it was an unfixed bug in the Firefox web browser that was causing the auto-collapsing. An add-on was published shortly thereafter that fixed the bug. After installing the add-on the bookmark folders would again appear on the toolbar and not auto-collapsed on the right side of it.

Users who experience a similar problem can install the add-on which will take care of the bug immediately. The bug fix is provided by the same developer who also created an add-on to disable the new tab tearing feature in Firefox that could accidentally create new browser windows.

Users who want to test it can visit the Drupal User Experience website and start playing the first video on the page. They will notice that the cursor will start to disappear for short intervals on all tabs that are open in Firefox. Tests with other web browsers revealed that some show like Opera and Internet Explorer show the same behavior while others like the Google browser Google Chrome seems to be immune and show the cursor all the time.

The problem persists even after stopping the playback of the video in question. One solution is to close the tab that contains the website with the Flickr video which stopped the mouse cursor from disappearing in Firefox. Another solution offered by Roman was to block the Flickr video script with the Firefox add-on NoScript.

The new Firefox version got rid of that bug and is currently distributed to all primary and secondary mirror sites. Users affected by this bug might want to download the version as early as possible which is why I take the liberty to post a working download mirror of the new Firefox version.

The Oregon primary mirror site contains the new release, at least the Firefox 2.0.0.11 Win32 US release, which can be downloaded and installed without problems. Other mirrors will follow soon after and I expect to see the announcement on the official Mozilla website later today.