GOOGLE WAVES GOODBYE TO FIREFOX TOOLBAR

Google Labs isn't the only thing winding down in Mountain View, it seems Google's Firefox toolbar is also kaput. Citing exponential growth in the browser space, the outfit declared that the Google toolbar for Firefox is no longer necessary -- modern browsers are just too darn capable. Support will continue for older versions of the browser, but Firefox 5 will have to stand on its own. Still, El Goog admits that dropping the toolbar kills more than a few features, and is offering a list of similarly featured add-ons to users via the defunct toolbar's help page. Not enough? Head on over to the announcement's comment page and join the peanut gallery, a few clever legumes seem to have uncovered a FF5 workaround. As for the rest of us, it's not like we didn't know Google had its own browser (and interests) to take care of, right?

MOZILLA BLOCKS SKYPE TOOLBAR BY DEFAULT DUE TO CRASHING

Mozilla has added the Skype toolbar to the blocklist it uses to block add-ons by default. The Skype toolbar gets automatically installed when the user installs or updates the main Skype application.

The issue with the Skype Toolbar for Mozilla is the fact it is creating two rather large problems in the Firefox browser. The first is that it makes Firefox crash a lot as the Mozilla blog entry about the toolbar explains:

The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week.

The second problem is that is causes a major performance hit for the browser:

The methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today (plain English: to the user, it appears that Firefox is slow loading web pages).

Mozilla does not want users to experience slow loading web pages and have a browser that crashes unexpectedly. So it has been decided the Skype Toolbar is being blocked by default for the time being.

Mozilla has made this a "soft" block, so users can still install the toolbar by overriding the block. Mozilla and Skype are talking to work out a resolution to the issues.