They should do this more often, especially considering all of the junk toolbars and addons that find their way onto user's systems.
Microsoft should consider this too, but knowing the EU, would jump on that (No matter how much good they are doing people).
Mozilla has announced that it will pull the plug on the Skype add-on toolbar for Firefox and remotely disable it following a spate of crashes and performance issues.
The Skype Toolbar add-on comes bundled with the chat program and is installed automatically with the main application. One of the features of the add-on is that it transforms telephone numbers found in web pages into clickable hyperlinks for easy dialing.
Well, that was the idea anyway. But the add-on has been found to cause serious performance problems, as well as being crashing the browser a total of 33,000 times in a single week.
After spending almost two weeks trying to contact someone at Skype who might be able to fix the problem, Justin Scott of the Mozilla add-ons team decided it was time to pull the plug on the add-on:
Over the past 2 weeks we’ve doubled our efforts to contact the Skype extension team and several people at Skype have told us they pinged the extension team for us. We did not receive a response from them until this afternoon.
Given the volume of crashes, the extent of the performance impact, the fact that users don’t actually choose to install this add-on, and the extension team’s lack of response during the weeks we were giving them to solve these issues, we should continue as planned to soft-block all versions of Skype in all versions of Firefox immediately.
This will supersede our previous soft-block of versions lower than 3.3.0.3970. I would like to wait on hard-blocking for a few days to see how helpful the soft-block is.
…
If these issues are fixed in a future version, we will be happy to reduce the block to only the affected versions. But with 33,000 crashes in the last week, this can’t wait any longer for a fix from Skype.
A soft-block will remotely disable the add-on but give users the option of overriding the block. A hard-block would disable the add-on and not give the user a chance to override the block. Mozilla hope that by soft-blocking the add-on this will encourage someone at Skype to come out of the woodwork and fix the add-on.
