back to article Mozilla blocks Firefox-breaking Skype toolbar

Mozilla has blocked a Skype toolbar add-on for its Firefox browser, after blaming the extension for causing 40,000 crashes last week. The open source outfit said it vastly slowed down webpage-loading times. The crash-prone add-on downed Firefox 3.6.13 - which is the current stable version of the browser - far too much, …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Breaks wiki editing too

    My work laptop is equipped with the Skype plug-in that shows phone numbers, and I've noticed that it screws up edits to Wikipedia, Wiktionary etc. It seems to "recognise" strings of numbers within the article you are editing and silently inserts some "PHONE_NUMBER_BEGIN" and "PHONE_NUMBER_END" stuff (I forget the exact text) that then gets saved into the article.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Bad spelling

    Skype, also spelt Shite!

  3. Mike Brown

    aha!

    i wondered what was up with firefox. goodbye skype!

  4. thesykes
    FAIL

    nothing new

    I had the plugin, years ago on another well-known browser and binned it after finding it reduced browsing to a crawl. Have ensured it never sees the light of day since.

    Seems Skype need to sort themselves out, the Android app is awful, with sound coming out of the loudspeaker and no option to use the ear speaker, this results in echoes for the person at the other end.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Skype sucks since the sale to eBay

    I heard the founders bought it back or something, but in recent months they've

    1) taken away my incoming number without telling me

    2) switched me back to a pay-per-minute plan instead of the vary reasonable one I had before

    3) display increasingly obnoxious ads, even though I was already paying for the service

    4) become increasingly unstable

    5) installing toolbars by default

    6) suffering from network outages and dropped calls

    This is to be a very proprietary, but very good product that saved my ass more than a few times in foreign countries. But ever since the sale they have been pissing on their customers.

    Fuck 'em!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      skype sucks since ...

      ... it stopped being a simple, light, voice communication tool that just did voice communication and did it well.

    2. streaky
      Pirate

      Failboat express

      #3 always pissed me off. If I had my cisco phone down in london I'd just shove skype on asterisk and it'd probably be a nice service.

  6. Greg J Preece

    Not the first time they've screwed up FF

    The original Skype plugin - the phone number recognising thingy - caused massive slowdowns in FF a year or two back. That made me disable it at the time, though admittedly it works fine now.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    What is this toolbar madness, eh ?

    Google Toolbar, Microsoft Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, AVG Toolbar, Winamp Toolbar, Skype Toolbar, I've encountered clueless users with three or four toolbars choking their browser and I asked myself are those developers so dumb ? Do they have an idea on what user experience looks like if every piece of software I install would come with its own useless foolbar ? We're already losing screen space because of the idiocy of wide screen displays (I need a 23 or 24 in widescreen to have about the same height as in my classic 19in) so all these toolbars may take up to 30% of the vertical available screen area. Why then do they assume their toolbar will be the only one ever installed ?

    1. Graham Marsden
      WTF?

      You think you've got problems...?

      Have a look at this toolbar madness!

      http://www.planitagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/too_many_toolbars.jpg

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        oh god!

        Is it likely that a user who has more than 1 (or 2) toolbars (including the FF/IE) toolbar installed doesn't actually do any work?

    2. Alastair 7

      @Anon

      " I asked myself are those developers so dumb ?"

      You made the easy mistake of assuming that this is the fault of developers. I guarantee you that someone in the marketing department saw the Google toolbar and said "we need our brand on our user's screens 24/7!", and immediately tasked a developer with this insidious task.

    3. Robert E A Harvey

      Aye

      I sympathise with Moz. I've blocked /every/ toolbar that tries to install itself. Why, for example, does a java update want to install a Yahoo toolbar? it's bollox, thats what it is.

  8. MrT
    FAIL

    Bad program, naughty program, to your bed....

    Skype's toolbar used to stop FF from opening second and subsequent windows - users were locked into the current windo and just had to make do with opening new tabs...

    Then they made it so the taskbar icon never disappeared, even if the app main window was closed (so it was another 'Minimise' instead) - instead of fixing that little glitch so it worked like every other program, they went on about it being the Windows 7 way - two more updates and it still stays live.

    I only use it for rare video calls - everything else goes via free minutes on other devices.

  9. Dog Faced Boy

    re: toolbar madness

    I feel it is the user that suffers from idiocy and that developers don't care that you are losing part of your viewing screen. I recently fixed a laptop with a 15.6" monitor that was running 6 toolbars. They only had half the screen for viewing the internet.

    I personally wanted to remove them but the person insisted they stayed (apart from the one toolbar that was malicious and giving her the viruses).

    Knowing the person, I reckon the next time I will be fixing their laptop, there will be even more toolbars installed. Some people just dont have a clue

    1. Demosthenese

      toolbars

      Maybe they need a toolbar toolbar to manage their toolbars.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    I wonder

    .... If they'll do the same for the Nectar tool bar which pushes FF's idling CPU usage up to over 15% and slows everything down as it tries to work out if the site you're visiting is a "Nectar Store"

  11. Russ Tarbox
    Happy

    Toolbars are killers.

    This is why I like Chrome so much. It's fast and even if your end user installs software without checking what they're agreeing to, it will have no effect on Chrome. Which is nice.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Skype has form

    ISTR that the Skype toolbar also broke IE as well. A couple of years ago I spent ages trying to sort out why a customer's system wouldn't work with a CMS editor. After a lot of grief tracked it down to the Skype toolbar; disabled that and everything worked well.

    Not surprised that it knackers Firefox.

  13. Bristol Dave

    Just bin the toolbar

    Oh, and the (beta) Linux client, which crashes on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine more than I care to mention.

    The integration on my Nokia N900 is very good though.

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