Firefox 45/46 freezes with NoScript

[troy]

Hi, I had this problem 3-4 times. I thought it was a bad-website problem but then it happened on blogger (don't remember which blog) and then on bing.

CPU goes 100% and memory usage goes higher and higher. FF is unresponsive and the only way to exit is to kill the process in Task Manager.

The last time it happened on http://www.bing.com/mapspreview and I did some testing:

1. the problem happens if bing.com and live.com scripts are allowed but virtualearth.net scripts aren't. Maps doesn't appear and Firefox hangs
2. no difference between ff45 and ff46
3. with a brand new profile and only NoScript installed ff still freezes
4. a couple of times with the new profile I got the "stop the script" prompt, but only once I was able to actually stop the script and close the tab

I'm on WinXP, FF 46.0.1

Thanks.

[barbaz]

That would be a bad-website problem. The site just doesn't gracefully error handle 3rd-party script failing to load.

Sure, it's NoScript that's blocking virtualearth.net on your setup, but I'd guess any other addon blocking virtualearth.net at that bing site would cause the same result.

[therube]

The site just doesn't gracefully error handle 3rd-party script failing to load.

An understatement.

[Thrawn]

It's probably possible to investigate and surrogate the broken script, given time. Otherwise, it will only work if you whitelist the third-party.

[barbaz]

It's probably possible to investigate and surrogate the broken script, given time.

virtualearth.net would not be a candidate for a default surrogate.

[Thrawn]

Why not? If someone might reasonably want to block it, and if at least one high-profile site is known to break badly when it is blocked, why not check whether some kind of surrogate would help? It wouldn't need to be a complete replacement, just enough to fix Bing.

Or, alternatively, it might be possible to write a surrogate that would run on bing.com and fix whatever there is breaking.

[barbaz]

As I understand it, default script-replacing surrogates are for "undesirable" scripts that aren't necessary to the user; virtualearth.net being a legitimate maps site it really is required for full functionality of sites. Best course of action here would be to report the issue to Microsoft and hope they can make the site fail in more of a "Sorry, we couldn't load virtualearth.net. Please make sure virtualearth.net is unblocked and try again." type way.

Or, alternatively, it might be possible to write a surrogate that would run on bing.com and fix whatever there is breaking.

+1, this could work as a default surrogate.