From the irritating freeze that seems to temporarily paralyse the address bar about 30 seconds after it has first booted, to the mystery disappearance of the close button when you’ve got nine or more tabs open, to the clumsy implementation of the new Private Browsing mode, to the way the browser refuses to reboot for about 30 seconds after it (increasingly frequently) crashes… Firefox is heading for a fall.

Fortunately for Firefox, Chrome still hasn’t got the one thing that keeps me rooted to the Mozilla browser for the time being: extensions. GMail Manager, Scrapbook, XMarks and TwitterFox are all that stand between me and a seedy tryst with Google Chrome.

However, it’s those very same extensions that are partially to blame for my number one Firefox frustration: the constant nagging. Barely a morning passes when I don’t boot Firefox to find that one or more of my extensions requires an update – not to mention the browser itself. Ignoring them simply delays the pain for another day; installing them normally means a wait of at least 30-60 seconds whilst the browser sorts itself out. The end result is an (arguably) needless delay to my working day.

Now Mozilla plans to nag me even more. The organisation has announced that it plans to start reminding users to upgrade outdated plugins. It’s starting with Adobe Flash Player (another piece of software that would come dangerously close to my Room 101 shortlist), but plans to move on to other third-party plugins by the time Firefox 3.6 arrives. Terrific. Pretty soon, I’ll have to boot Firefox before I get in the shower every morning, just so that’s it’s ready to use by the time I want to sit down and start working.

I’m not blind to the benefits of keeping the browser and its various add-ons updated, not least for security reasons. Indeed, Mozilla even seems to be suggesting that these pesky outdated plugins are partly responsible for the browser crashes. But unless Mozilla finds a way to make these updates less intrusive, I’m going to be off to browser pastures new. And I might just nag you to join me.