I was witnessing some erratic behavior lately after installing several applications on my new computer. One of the applications was Skype and it did turn out that Skype did install a Skype Firefox Extension which causes many problems. My problem was that some images were not displaying at all but simply returned a The image [...] cannot be displayed, because it contains errors failure. I also witnessed that Netvibes was constantly reloading it’s content which made me almost switch to another service because I thought at the beginning that it had something to do with the new version of Netvibes.
Several users responded in the thread and it turned out that the Skype Firefox extension was the culprit. It can cause a permanent page refresh, stop a page from loading correctly, cause image and pdf display problems and make Firefox unresponsive and even hang the browser completely.
I was not able to figure out another solution but to uninstall the Skype Firefox extension. I only realized that I had it installed after someone pointed out that it could be the cause for the behavior. My suggestion is to uninstall it as fast as possible.
The only effect that the toolbar has anyway is that it marks any phone number on a page so that a Skype user could call that phone directly.
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5 Responses to “Skype Firefox Extension is causing many problems”
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[...] a comment about this bug over at gHacks, a user named Nick suggests getting the latest beta release of the Skype toolbar (which as of [...]
There is a fix btw! follow this link https://developer.skype.com/SkypeToolbars/ to get the beta extension for FF or IE.
I’m a Skype user, but AFAIR it never offers me a toolbar. I wouldn’t accept it anyway, either. I think that, contrary to FF extensions, less toolbars is better for sure.
As ex-moderator of software subforum one of big forums, I remember, how often Google toolbar gave people problems, for example.
This extension is the beginning of a nightmare! It took me weeks to figure out why my stumble upon toolbar wasn’t showing why my gmail notifier was showing only some times and some times it didn’t, firefox wouldn’t close properly and stayed open as background process. All this got fixed as soon as I disabled skype extension! dont install this!!
I also was getting very high cpu usage with Firefox and it was slowing my entire PC down. I eventually found the culprit. It was the Skype add-on extension.
Disabling it and then de-installing it cured the problem. I never really used the extension for calling numbers via the browser so it’s no problem.