14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has had enough. The Skype Toolbar for Firefox, which is added automatically when you install Skype has been the cause of crashes, slowdowns and general instability in Firefox. Mozilla says it accounted for 40,000 crashes in the last week alone so the team is now adding all versions of the Skype toolbar to the Mozilla Firefox Blacklist. The toolbar will be disabled for all Firefox users which will have the option to re-enable it if they wish.
"We’ll add all versions, up to and including the current shipping and beta versions, of the Skype Toolbar to the Mozilla Firefox Blocklist for all versions of Firefox," Mozilla announced.
The Skype toolbar is bundled with the default Skype install. Unless users specifically customize their options during the setup process, the toolbar gets installed.
Because this is done automatically and because it is not obvious to the user that something has been installed, many may not be aware that they even have it in Firefox.
The Skype Toolbar for Firefox modifies webpages to transform phone numbers into clickable buttons to enable users to start Skype calls from the browser.
"The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week," Mozilla said.
"Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today," it explained.
Since the toolbar is installed by a large number of people, whether they know it or not, Mozilla believed that the issues were too great and affecting too many people to be ignored any longer.
Within the next 48 hours, the Skype extension will be disabled for all Firefox users. They will be notified and have the option of re-enabling it if they believe they are not affected.
This is called a softblock by Mozilla. However, if crashes continue to be a problem, there is the option of a hardblock which would make it impossible for users to run the Skype toolbar even if they wanted.
Mozilla says it has contacted Skype about the issues and will remove it from the blacklist once the problems are fixed. Some toolbar versions were already included in the blacklist.