Skype Click to Call makes Firefox painfully slow

I’ve been having some troubles with Firefox lately, particularly when trying to use gmail. It’s been painfully slow (10-15 seconds just to change folders), and locking up the whole browser in the process. I decided to finally take my own advice and go through the troubleshooting steps we suggest people use when they’re having similar problems with SearchTempest.com or AutoTempest.com.

I found that if I restarted Firefox in safe mode (with all add-ons disabled), things were once again nice and snappy. Went from 10s+ to switch labels in gmail to around one second. Sweet. At first I figured the culprit must be something gmail-related, like PowerBot or Gmelius. (And I was pretty choked. Losing Gmelius wouldn’t be a big deal, but PowerBot is a huge productivity boost for me.) Fortunately though, the real culprit was an add-on I never use and didn’t even install: Skype Click to Call. It appears that this add-on is installed automatically when you install Skype. It’s probably an opt-in of some sort, and I imagine I must’ve figured it would be useful at the time, but for some reason, they failed to mention how it would make the browser an order of magnitude slower…

Anyway, it’s gone now, and gmail (and everything else) is fast once again!

2 thoughts on “Skype Click to Call makes Firefox painfully slow

  1. Larry Page

    Nathan, Search Tempest will not work this morning thru Google. I get “HTTP Forbidden, The website declined to show this page”
    How can I fix this please? I just discovered Search Tempest a few days ago , It is amazing. Great job. Larry

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