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, …
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.
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.
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!
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 ?
" 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.
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.
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
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.
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