Firefox blocks Skype add-on

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Skype Toolbar, a Firefox extension bundled with the popular phone calling application, has been added to Mozilla's list of banned add-ons, said Mozilla in a blog post Thursday.

"The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in nearly 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week," said Mozilla. "Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you're using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can ... drastically affect the page rendering times of a large percentage of Web content."

The Skype Toolbar detects phone numbers embedded in Web pages, at the time makes those numbers clickable so that users can more easily dial with the Skype desktop program. The Firefox add-on is installed by default when the desktop version of the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software is installed or updated.