Firefox is the browser I use and love, but I've started noticing something that is very frustrating and I'm not alone. Form information isn't being saved after you exit Firefox and any possible fix isn't planned until late 2007.

Saved form information is the words you type in for an online form. The easiest way to see this is by going to Google, putting your mouse cursor in search box and the hitting the down arrow. You should be able to see all the words you've typed into the Google search box. This is an extremely handy feature since it retains information you've used in the past.

Unfortunatley, Firefox reaches a point and will stop saving this information for you. It's happened to me, and it's happened to many other people as well.

Keep in mind that saved form information is different than saved user names and passwords. Firefox will continue to save your user name and password information, but not the saved forms information. Also, the saved form information works for all websites, not just Google. We're using Google here as an example.

To see if you have this problem, load firefox, go to Google and type a word that you've never searched for into the search box. I used ADAMS to test with, as it starts with an A and I've never searched for it before. Hit enter and let Google show you the results. Go back to the Google front page, put your mouse cursor on the search box and hit the down arrow. Look for the word you just searched for. It should be there.

At this point close Firefox and make sure it's no longer in memory. Reload Firefox, go to Google, put your mouse cursor in the search box and hit the down arrow. Your search term should be there, but if it isn't, congratulations. You've been hit by the saved form bug . (Links to Google Search since search has been turned off at the Mozilla support forum.)

If you pop over to Bugzilla you will see bug 331276 . It details the issue, the symptoms and the cause. Read through it and you'll see that various extensions will cause this to happen. At first it appears the Tab Mix Plus extension is the cause, but reports are posted from people that don't have Tab Mix Plus installed. It's an odd combination of extensions that causes this to happen like a special stew of code cripples Firefox.

The good news is that they have confirmed the bug, but the bad news is that it won't be fixed until late 2007. As Michael Kraft noted:

The bad news is that it is still broken in the latest nightly of Bon Echo, presumably because sqlite is not yet being used for form data in Bon Echo as it was pushed back to the 3.0 release. So while this is fixed, the public won't see it until Firefox 3.0 comes out some time in late 2007 (at the earliest).

I have tried to remove all combinations of extensions to fix the bug, but nothing seems to work. There is no workaround, so if you rely on saved form information you might have to reinstall Firefox and rebuild your profile.

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