Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog

Updated Skype Toolbar Extension Available

7 responses

On January 20th, 2011, the Skype Toolbar extension was added to Firefox’s add-on blocklist for causing Firefox to crash and imparting a significant performance hit on DOM manipulation. We’ve been in contact with Skype since that time, and have provided information to identify the crashes our users are seeing, along with suggested methods to reduce the performance impacts of their extension.

The Skype development team have been working on those issues, and released a new version of the Skype Toolbar for Firefox this week. 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. 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.

Skype users can obtain the new version of the extension by updating their copy of Skype, or by downloading a new version from the Skype website.

7 comments on “Updated Skype Toolbar Extension Available”

  1. Kohei Yoshino wrote on

    A Japanese translation of this article is available at
    http://mozilla.jp/blog/entry/6430/

  2. Ferdinand wrote on

    Is there a way of permanently blocking the Skype extension?

    1. Robert wrote on

      Er, yes. Go to the Tools menu, then select Add-ons.
      Look for the Skype extension in the list and then click “Disable”. Restart your browser for changes to take effect.

  3. Jessica wrote on

    Good that it was removed. I had the Skype Toolbar for a while in my FireFox and then deleted it manually because it was crashing a lot. Would be nice if Skype could fix this issue.

  4. PUA wrote on

    I use SKYPE all day every day, so I am definitely going to install this plugin now.

    Thx

  5. Roland B wrote on

    I just installed the Skype toolbar on the latest Firefox 4 Beta. As soon as my browser started it started opening numerous pages with a welcome to Skype page. This just continued and I had to shut down the browser. I had to uninstall the toolbar to use my browser again. I am using Windows XP with all the latest updates.

  6. AlphaWolf wrote on

    Go Mozilla.

    I hope this fixes the skype auto number dialing problem. The auto number dials were causing lots of crashes previously in IE and even Chrome