How to stop Skype Toolbar from changing numbers to ‘Skype Buttons’ & ruining your website design

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IMPORTANT: SkypeKiller has been updated to support FireFox & Chrome, click here to goto the new post.

One of the most annoying features of the Skype toolbar is its intrusive ‘button’ injection that hijacks your website, changing phone numbers for buttons and ruining your web sites design. I’ve just installed Skype and it installed the toolbar on my machine by default and was ‘killing’ the look of some of my websites.

I researched how to prevent it and found the Skype Toolbar META tag that is meant to stop the toolbar doing this. In my experience it doesn’t.

Anti-Skype Meta Tag – DOES NOT WORK! (At least consistently):

So I started researching more alternatives, nothing came back fruitful within my half hours worth of Googling so I decided to have a look at what I could do.

I found that the Skype Toolbar injects HTML code into Internet Explorers DOM, so this had to be an obvious starting point to stop the hijacking. After a little ‘playing around’ I found the correct object & class names and knocked up a JavaScript to check the page for the insertion of the elements and remove them.

The script is set to run loops with breaks (so it’s not a CPU hog!) for the first two seconds of a pages initialisation which should also give enough time for slow machines to render the HTML and for Skype to remove it. The only minor is that if you concentrate on looking at the number you may see a split second flicker while my code removes the buttons. Anwayz it works!

I have zipped up the script along with a few sample pages so you can verify results, comments on IE version and ToolBar versions that it works / doesn’t work on would be handy.

SkypeKiller has been updated to support FireFox & Chrome, click here to goto the new post >>

I have completed very limited testing on this, really only on IE8 with version 4.2.0.4997 of the Toolbar installed. I also intend to work in some more features to allow you to specify with tags any numbers you don’t want the button removed for.