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“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.” “This extension is bundled with the Skype application, and is installed into Firefox by default when Skype is installed or, in some circumstances, updated.” — Mozilla

It also busts certain designs. This sort of behavior from Skype is unacceptable.

Good on Mozilla, this is great for their users.

I disable any add-on for any browser I currently have that I did not expressedly install myself. That being said I've expected this kind of behavior and malpractice from Microsoft not Skype. Terrible shame, too.
You are right to expect this from Microsoft, they've done it before:

http://robertnyman.com/2009/01/26/microsoft-force-installs-f...

I also have never been able to remove it from the toolbar without uninstalling it unlike every other extension. Haven't used it lately though.
Could they also please block all the .NET-related addons that Microsoft development products install nowadays? They're even set so YOU CANNOT REMOVE THEM FROM WITHIN THE BROWSER. WHY is this even possible? The addons also alter your User-Agent.

If you've never seen this before, Google ".net addon firefox".

I wish they would make it so that addons and plugins can only be installed inside Firefox (via addons.mozilla.org, File > Open or exceptions for trusted sites.)

I have seven plugins listed and I only installed two of them.

  2007 Microsoft Office system - Installed with Office 2007
  Google Update - Installed with Google Chrome (??)
  Java Deployment Toolkit - Installed with Java (on Firefox blocklist)
  Java Platform - Installed with Java
  Picasa - Installed with Google Picassa
  Shockwave Flash - I installed this
  Silverlight - I installed this
In the extension category only two are there that I didn't installed

  FiddlerHook - Installed with Fiddler (not removed after uninstalling Fiddler, uninstall button greyed out in Firefox)
  Java Console - Installed with Java
That wouldn't be good for Linux distributions which have their own package management system. For example Fedora offers the following packages: mozilla-adblockplus, mozilla-vlc, mozilla-noscript etc.
IMHO, the Linux distros are doing it wrong. Just because you have a package management system, doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. I think hackers have seen the absolutely shitpile that most distro's make when they try to override things like CPAN, Ruby Gems, etc. They really need to go hands off on some of those things and let the secondary package manager do it's job

Just because you've got a hammer, doesn't mean every problem is a nail.

Definitely. As a hacktivist, I'm sure you're familiar with the dangers of browser plugins. I find that browsers allow this behaviour to be extremely unnerving.
It's possible to register non-profile extensions in the registry, specifically so software installed on the system can be shared across user accounts, and be installed/uninstalled orthogonally to Firefox.

The downside, of course, is that Firefox doesn't know how to uninstall these extensions. You can of course still disable them, which has almost exactly the same effect.

Are these Microsoft addins causing you crashes or other problems?
"Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13"

In 2010, Mike Beltzner (director of Firefox) announced that Flash causes more crashes than any other plugin. Maybe they should ban Flash while they're at it.

We all know that's not possible. That would be like Firefox blocking requests to facebook.com because some users end up getting phished or stuck with malware from facebook apps. Nobody would use a browser that blocks flash (and doesn't support h.264 in <video>).
If I remember right, this was right before Firefox 3.6.4 introduced out-of-process plugins so Flash has its own process to crash instead of taking down the whole browser.

Of course, for some reason the Skype plugin is still capable of crashing it...

That's because it's an extension, not a plugin.
The Skype plugin adds much less functionality to the browser than flash.
I'm a big supporter of not letting open platforms/systems/etc turn into digital ghettos. The "anything goes" approach is just a little too self destructive for me. Often it ends up just forcing people into a more closed platform. In this case FireFox starts crashing constantly so how do most people react? Go back to IE? Probably.
Nobody's talking about you, Android.
It feels really fishy that skype forces you to install something like this.

Any time a company pulls something like this on me, they lose all credibility in my book. Its as bad as spyware and adware.

To be clear, it's an option in the installer that you can uncheck.

Of course the vast majority of users won't notice that, and the add-on has a terrible habit of breaking page layouts, so this is a great move by Mozilla.

No, its not. I just installed Skype yesterday, and the installer doesn't even mention the plugin. It just installs it.

I immediately disabled it because it has caused problems for me in the past.

The installer does ask if you want to install the Chrome toolbar.

Oops. I remember having an option before, guess they changed that.
I cannot take any site seriously that uses Kontera or any other "on-hover to trigger, click tiny close button to dismiss" in-text advertising (as used in the article posted).

Does anyone actually disagree that this is a horrible way to monetise your content?

Not only is it a pain for users, but also for web application developers. I recently had to explicitly check for and strip out the Skype phone number highlighting code in the back-end of a simple database app.

Just look at the astonishing number of odd places that the highlighting codes have ended up on the web: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=begin_of_the_skype_highligh...

We often see calls that Firefox should block outside programs from installing addons. That would be nice, but as long as installers have write permission to the Firefox directory, there is no way to block them. Mozilla could try to make it difficult, but the toolbar installers would just use more hacky methods, which would break Firefox even more often than it does now.
I totally agree, I disabled the Skype Toolbar for Chrome a long time ago because it seems like it constantly crashes.
If Apple did this, Mozilla would be bleating about Apple censoring Skype.