Mozilla: No More Skype Toolbar

Tweet

Users love its chat feature. It also automatically converts phone numbers from text to clickable links to initiate a VoIP phone call. That's the good news about the Skype Toolbar add-on for Mozilla's Firefox browser. The bad news is that's its apparantly so buggy that Mozilla has decided to block it. As for users who already have it loaded onto their browser, Mozilla has announced it will remotely disable it to save you from yourself as you try to make calls.

According to Mozilla, they are now averaging about 33,000 browser crashes a week from the Skype Toolbar. The engineers at Mozilla first smelled gas on this one back in November. Word is, they have tried to work with the engineers at Skype to no avail. You can follow their tale of woe on this thread from their "Bugzilla" forum.

If you do have the Skype toolbar on your Firefox browser and want to keep it running, you can manually set it to avoid it being disabled.

In other news... Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the iPad.

The updates on Representative Giffords, recovering from a gunshot wound to the brain in the wake of the Tuscon shootings, couldn't be more hopeful or inspiring.

Giffords is not only surviving, but thriving, and apparantly she's getting help from using an iPad.

Word is that although she is unable to speak and despite her limited motor skills, Giffords is able to scroll through her iPad and communicate using an app called Proloquo2go. It's a pricey app going for $189, but undoubtedly worth every penny given that it is giving her (and other patients) a way to speak. The app offers touch-activated pictures that translate to artculated words out loud for her.

Behind every miracle, it is inevitable you will find even more miracles.

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio