Mozilla blocks Skype’s glitchy Firefox toolbar extension

By Molly McHugh Published January 21, 2011

The Skype toolbar add-on has became a headache for Mozilla, and will be blocked from the Firefox browser until further notice. Mozilla announced yesterday that the Skype feature was responsible for roughly 40,000 crashed browsers in the last week, and was seriously slowing down page loading.

We can’t imagine there are too many people who are crushed about losing a toolbar plug-in, but for those of you that are – don’t worry too much yet. Mozilla reassures users that this is only a “soft block” while it looks into identifying and fixing the issues with help from the Skype Toolbar team. This also means that while the extension is currently disabled on Firefox’s end, you will be notified of the block and allowed to re-enable it as you see fit.

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So what are you missing until the toolbar is fully functional? The plug-in cooperates with Skype software to identify phone numbers on individual web pages and making it that much easier to make VoIP calls.

Skype reported it’s working on the bug. “Based on our initial investigation, we know that downloading the new client will fix for most users any compatibility issues, and are working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues. We are sorry for an inconvenience this has caused our users.” Last month, Skype experienced its second major outage of the year that left approximately 12 million regular users without access for over 24 hours.

Former Social Media/Web Editor

Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…

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