Mozilla blocks ‘crashing’ Skype Toolbar for Firefox
Makes the browser fall over, says developer
Mozilla has blocked the Skype extension from working on its Firefox browser, saying that it causes the browser to crash and load web pages slowly.
Adding the toolbar to the Firefox blocklist, Mozilla found several things wrong with it. One issue that Skype automatically installs the toolbar when it installs, giving many people an option that they didn’t necessarily want.
However, it was the flaws Mozilla detected that caused the extension to be blocked. In particular, it was found that the current Skype Toolbar was one of the top crashers of the browser, responsible for almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox in a week.
Additionally, it was found that the method that some versions of the Toolbar used can “make the DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today)”. In other words, it makes Firefox look as though it’s really slow.
“As a result, 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,” said the Mozilla blog
The blocklist is a “soft” one, meaning that people will be notified that the Toolbar has been disabled and that they can re-enable it. Mozilla is now working with the Skype Toolbar team to address the issues, so that the block can be removed.
