530995 - Skype addon causes perf hit

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Extension Compatibility, defect)

Description

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

A friend was asking for some help with some perf issues with Firefox -- he had frequent scrolling / keystroke lag, often very slow browser perf and instability.  He eventually tracked it down to the Skype addon; he runs no other addons, and that was auto-installed.  Disabled it and all is back to normal.

Firefox 3.5.3
Skype 4.1
Skype Extension 3.3.0.3971

The extension was installed directly with skype, he never did a Skype upgrade on his laptop.  Skype wasn't running when he was seeing the problems. Windows XP, on an Acer 10" netbook (1.6ghz, 1gb ram).

Can someone try to reproduce this?  Skype's pretty common, and even if this isn't showing up on crashkill, it might be the cause of some serious perf issues.

Comment 1

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Kev, Peter: please see comment 0 in this report. It looks like the Skype add-on which is installed with the application may cause a Firefox performance regression.

We should try to figure out why that might be (especially on scroll/keystroke) and then make a call about how to fix it.

Vlad: Peter is the product manager for the extension.

Comment 2

[Peter Kalmström, PM Skype Toolbars]

I apologize for the trouble. Could you give us some more details regarding this? Was it on all sites or some particular ones?

Also we do have a newer version due out soon, that we believe fixes most performance troubles:
https://developer.skype.com/SkypeToolbars/

Comment 3

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Just asked the original reporter.. he was seeing the problem on all sites.  Was showing up frequently as keystroke lag in any input fields, such as in facebook, livejournal, wordpress sites, etc.

Comment 4

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

While testing Firefox 3.6 RC 1 I have seen some strangeness after I installed this extension which is bundled with Skype. In my case I had issues with the Firefox menu being unresponsive as well as a View source window that was frozen. I am investigating further on the Windows QA lab machines.

Comment 5

[Marcia Knous [:marcia]]

Using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20091221 Firefox/3.5.7 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) and the latest version of Skype extension for Firefox 3.3.0.3971. So far I don't see any lagging issues on Facebook but I will keep investigating.

Comment 6

[Lilian PM for Skype]

This issue should be fixed in the latest version of skype toolbars (version 5.0.0.6906).  We recommend that users install the latest version of the Skype Client to fix the issue.  You can find the latest install here: http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/get-skype/

Comment 7

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Closing per comment #6. Please reopen if you are still experiencing issues and include the version number of the Skype add-on/toolbar that is installed.