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In the case of Warning: unresponsive script, I want to make the popup not show up and always cancel the hungup script: can I?

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I always answer by canceling the script since continuing doesn't seem to help the problems. I'm getting more and more of these from lots of different sites and many of them may be from ads. I would simply like to avoid the popup and have the script canceled automatically if it cannot run. Is this possible? If so, how? I still want to allow scripts to run that are able. Thanks.

I always answer by canceling the script since continuing doesn't seem to help the problems. I'm getting more and more of these from lots of different sites and many of them may be from ads. I would simply like to avoid the popup and have the script canceled automatically if it cannot run. Is this possible? If so, how? I still want to allow scripts to run that are able. Thanks.

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I actually don't know of a way to auto-cancel slow scripts. Since this could leave the page in a half-functional state, it seems somewhat risky to not notify you of the problem.

One reason for frequent slow script errors is the protected mode feature of the Flash player plugin. The Protected Mode feature has security benefits, but seems to have compatibility issues on some systems. You can disable it by creating or editing a settings file. The following pages/posts provide different approaches for that:

Flash needs to completely unload from memory (exiting and starting Firefox up again might help) before this takes effect.


Assuming Flash is the culprit, two potential stopgap measures are:

(1) Using an ad blocking add-on to reduce the number of Flash ads.

(2) Setting Flash to "click to play" rather than allowing it to run automatically. This is an extra step you might find annoying in some cases, but if you want to try it...

You can adjust this setting on the Add-ons page. Either:

  • Command+Shift+a (Windows: Ctrl+Shift+a)
  • "3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Plugins. Then on the right side, change the permission for Shockwave Flash from Always Activate to Ask to Activate. (If you have plugins that run in the background or globally, such as security plugins, you may encounter problems using Ask to Activate for those. This setting works best with in-page content player type plugins.)

Of course, once you give permission to a site, each Flash player in the page can run. Taking detailed control requires an add-on. I think this one might be the best integrated with the standard permission feature:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/click-to-play-per-element/