I signed up to beta test the PayPal Debit card. It allowed you to pay online with a PayPal credit card that instantly debits your PayPal account. I used this because I had a small balance in my account from FreeNameAStar.com.

Recently it asked me to upgrade. I clicked OK. I should have known that there was something wrong when it kept asking me to upgrade every morning. After about a week it finally installed a new browser extension in FireFox.

The new PayPal add-in is dreadful. It has crashed FireFox 6 times today. It keeps reporting that Google.com is a Phishing site. It can’t find my forms to fill in the account number. My browser runs impossibly slow when I have multiple windows open.

I decided to sh-can PayPal, but the Uninstall button is grayed out in the FireFox add-in menu. It won’t let me uninstall.

I didn’t want to do a complete install because I figured that I would use IE when the time came to actually use the service. I had to go into my Firefox configuration files to delete the lines that load the add-in.

This is a shame because I really wanted to use the PayPal debit card to do my Christmas shopping. I have had to use my real plastic credit card today and I don’t want Erica to see what I am buying.

Perhaps it is my bad attitude, but I like t think that the code for the new PayPal thingy was developed at an offshore programming sweatshop. Not that American coders aren’t capable of crashing my computer (I’ve done it myself more than once), but it seems that there was a quality control issue in the software that was not addressed. Somebody let it ship with major bugs. This sounds like a programming shop that said “Sure we tested it.” just to get their money. I hope PayPal put a stop on the check.