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.

GOOGLE'S CHROME BROWSER HITS 10,000 EXTENSIONS

Yesterday, Google put up a post on the Chromium Blog to celebrate a year of extensions being available for their Chrome web browser. The main part of the post touts some big numbers that the feature has accumulated in the past 12 months. Those include, over 8,500 extensions, 1,500 themes, a third of Chrome users now having at least one extension installed, and over 70 million extension and theme installs total. But actually, looking at the Extension Gallery, the numbers may be even bigger.

According to the pages in the Extensions Gallery, there are actually now over 10,000 extensions in the gallery. 10,078, to be exact. The “Most Popular“, “Most Recent“, and the “Top Rated” areas point to that number. Each area shows what would appear to be accurate counts for the total number of extensions currently in the Gallery.

It’s not clear why Google wouldn’t tout the 10,000 number instead of the “over 8,500″ while marking their one-year milestone. But unless their Gallery counts are off, the number is into five digits now, just a year after launch. (It is worth noting that the Chrome Web Store does count just over 8,500 extensions. Presumably, the Chrome Web Store will eventually be the official home of extensions, but the standalone area does still exist with its higher count.)

And the number is also significant because Chrome’s chief rival when it comes to extensions (aka add-ons) is, of course, Firefox. So how many add-ons are available on that browser? Mozilla isn’t quite as transparent with the counts (instead, not surprisingly, they focus on cumulative download numbers), but presumably if you add up the totals from all the categories, you’ll get the overall total. As it stands today, that number is 12,739. [TechCrunch]