14 DAY TRIAL // More than a month ago, Mozilla took the drastic but needed measure of blacklisting the Skype toolbar, effectively disabling it for all Firefox users. They could opt to have it enabled again, but Mozilla believed the stability and performance issues the add-on had were severe enough to have it blocked. The Skype team has now fixed the issues and the add-on has been removed from the blacklist.
"The Skype development team have been working on those issues, and released a new version of the Skype Toolbar for Firefox this week," Mozilla wrote.
"We’ve tested this new version, and have found it corrects the conditions that caused Firefox to crash, and significantly reduces the performance impacts that led to its blocklisting," it explained.
"As a result, we’ve modified the blocklist such that versions of the extension equal or greater than 5.2.0.7165 are no longer soft-blocked," Mozilla announced.
Issues with the Skype toolbar for Firefox go back years and there have been plenty of unhappy users since. While the toolbar does provide some utility, there were several problems with it.
For one, it installed itself automatically with every Skype install, unless the user specifically chose not to. The toolbar works by modifying websites, at the DOM level, and adding a link to start a Skype conversation for every phone number it encounters.
However, the toolbar was particularly buggy and was one of the leading cause for crashes in Firefox 3.6.13. Tens of thousands of crashes each week were attributed to the Skype toolbar.
Not only that, it also caused a huge performance handicap when rendering pages in some cases. This would make Firefox itself look slow.
Finally, Mozilla made the decision to ban the add-on until fixes were implemented. By adding it to the Firefox add-on blocklist, it was automatically disabled on any install.
But Mozilla has worked with the Skype team and the latest update to the toolbar seems to fix most of the issues Mozilla had with it. As such, the toolbar has now been removed from the blocklist.