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[CA3LE6UY]

Mozilla this week announced that the company will be blocking the Skype Toolbar add-on for Firefox and remotely disabling it for existing users. Why? According to a <a href="http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/01/20/blocking-the-skype-toolbar-in-firefox/">post to the Mozilla blog</a>, the add-on, which detects phone numbers in web pages and re-renders them as a clickable button for easy calling, is a buggy mess. It's so buggy in fact, that Mozilla proclaimed it among the top contributors to Firefox crashes as well as being responsible for significant degradation in browsing speed for users:<

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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. 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 (plain English: to the user, it appears that Firefox is slow loading web pages). We believe that both of these items constitute a major, user-facing issue, and meet our established criteria for blocklisting an add-on.

As a result, Firefox says they've added the add on to their <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/blocklist/">blocklist</a> until Skype can get their house in order. This is technically a "soft" block for existing users, meaning they can still turn on the add on manually if they wish. In a statement, Skype proclaimed that downloading the new client "will fix for most users any compatibility issues" and that the company is "working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues."

Source: DSLReports.com