Crashes on Yahoo pages: Yahoo Application State Plugin
Many Adblock and Adblock Plus users experience frequent browser crashes, especially when they are browsing Yahoo pages. As it came out, these are caused by a browser plugin called Yahoo Application State Plugin.
Update: Apparently, this issue has been resolved in Yahoo Messenger 8.1. Still, removing npYState.dll as recommended here won’t harm.
How do I know Yahoo Application State Plugin is installed?
Type about:plugins in the location bar of your browser to get the list of installed plugins. You should have one called “Yahoo Application State Plugin”, file name is nsYState.dll.
Where did this plugin come from and what is it good for?
If you don’t remember installing then you are correct — you did not. This plugin installs automatically and unasked when you install Yahoo Messenger. It seems that the purpose of the plugin is to give information about your Yahoo Messenger installation to Yahoo pages. These pages then can show you special advertisements for paid Messenger features (but they didn’t last time I checked because of a programming mistake).
How do I get rid of it?
You don’t need to uninstall Yahoo Messenger, removing the plugin is sufficient. So far nobody complained about missing Messenger functionality after they removed Yahoo Application State Plugin, which confirms that the analysis above is correct and this plugin is useless. Simply locate the file npYState.dll on your disk (usually it is installed in C:\Program files\Yahoo!\Shared) and remove it. You can also move it to a different directory, then you can always put it back if you feel that something doesn’t work because this file is missing.
Related links
- Mozilla bug database: Yahoo Application State plugin seems to cause random Firefox 1.5 crashes
- Adblock Plus forum: Adblock (plus) crashes my browser
- Mozillazine forums: Problem using yahoo in firefox