Friday, January 21, 2011

Firefox Blocking the Skype Toolbar

No, this is not a "network neutrality" violation, but Firefox finds the "Skype Toolbar for Firefox," an extension that detects phone numbers in web pages and re-renders them as a clickable button that can be used to dial the number using the Skype desktop application, causes browser crashes.

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 says.

This extension is bundled with the Skype application, and is installed into Firefox by default when Skype is installed or, in some circumstances, updated. As a result, a large number of Firefox users who have installed Skype have also installed the Skype Toolbar, knowingly or unknowingly.

Loosely-coupled networks drive innovation. But innovation of that sort also can lead to unexpected conflicts and problems.

1 comment:

Robert Powell said...

Not to mention the fact that the Skype add-on for Firefox is incredibly annoying to start with. I turn the thing off every time Skype sends an update that turns it back on by default.

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