InformAction Forums

Hello! I am having a strange problem with Firefox and noscript. I have some bad habits in my browsing: I keep 6 windows with hundreds of open tabs, and I don't reboot the PC for weeks until I am really forced to (by the ram use increasing until there is none left). So I didn't upgrade Firefox to the last version in the last few weeks. Noscript was upgraded by Firefox automatically to version 11.2.14 during this long period without a reboot.

Today I rebooted the PC (I am using Linux Mint) without upgrading Firefox, and when I tried to start Firefox again after the reboot, it didn't load any page. What happened was that Firefox gobbled a lot of RAM at the beginning, as usual (it gets usually to 5-6 GB after a few seconds), but instead of going down after that (usually, after all the open tabs in each windows is shown), it remained stuck a 5,6GB of RAM use. The cpu use instead was noticeably lower than what I am used to see at the start (I have the system monitor set to 100% for each core, so with a 4-cores cpu it can go to 400%. Usually when I start firefox it goes to 200-250% for a few seconds and then going down to almost zero, This time it west quickly to around 100%, then dropped to 50%... and stayed there.
The end result: all the six windows open, the tabs show the title of the page on the title bar, but they are empty, eternally loading, loading, but showing nothing. The CPU is stuck at 50%, RAM use is stuck at 5,5 GB, noscripts is shown on the page with the symbol it has usually on the system pages and clicking on it does nothing.
If I click on the "stop loading" X symbol on each of the six tabs, the CPU use goes down to zero, but the ram is still at 5,5GB, and nothing is shown, even if I try to reload the page.
If I open the Add-on page, it shows the "suggested add-on" but not noscript or any dictionary (it only shows the openh264 video codec, that was pre-installed)
And when I close Firefox, it goes down to around 1GB, and then firefox crashes...

I tried opening Firefox in safe mode, and it worked, everything worked fine. Noscript is the only Add-on I have installed, apart from the Italian Dictionary (I am italian, if you want we can use italian to talk, I am using english because this is an international forum). So I tried to upgrade it to the last version that I saw on the site, 11.2.15 (still being in safe mode), and tried to reboot the PC and firefox. But i got the same results. I tried to upgrade Firefox from 95.0.1 to 96.0.1 (and I applied every other upgrade suggested by mint for my version, I am still using Mint 19.3), but the results are the same.

Finally, after trying a lot of things, I found a temporary solution:
1) Start Firefox in safe mode, disable noscript, close firefox
2) Star Firefox normally, with noscript still disabled, so that Firefox start normally.
3) open the Add-on page and enable noscript. After that, everything works normally (I think, I am testing this right now but after one hour everything still works)
4) Remember to disable noscript before closing firefox, and in that case you can start at (2). If you forget, start again at (1)

After I found this solution this problem went from "help, I can't use my PC" level to the level of an annoyance, but it's really annoying. I am posting this hoping that you can solve this, and to help anybody else who has the same problem but didn't find that solution.

Could you please send your NoScript Options>Export file to my email address (top right of https://maone.net)?
Also, does the problem persist if (after backing up them or your whole profile, if you prefer) you close all your tabs and restart the browser?
Thanks!

Giorgio Maone wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 6:37 am Also, does the problem persist if (after backing up them or your whole profile, if you prefer) you close all your tabs and restart the browser?

I didn't try that, but I have already a different firefox profile, with only half a dozen of open tabs, for when I need to videocall and I want an unburdened firefox. I tried to use that different profile and it loaded without problems, so I think that the number of open windows and tabs is tied to the problem.

M-R wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 8:17 pm I tried to use that different profile and it loaded without problems, so I think that the number of open windows and tabs is tied to the problem.

Either the number or a specific site in one of those tabs.
Could you try maybe to bisect them by windows?

Hello! Sorry to make you wait so long for a reply. I had a very urgent job very near the deadline (so much that I didn't dare close Firefox again until it was finished).

I finally closed Firefox yesterday, after a couple of weeks without any hassle. In that time I had closed around a hundred tabs and opened a little more than that, Noscript was automatically updated to the 11.2.16 version, but I waited before upgrading Firefox from 96.0.1 to 96.0.2 (so i ended up jumping directly from 96.0.1 to 96.0.3). It was going so well that I hoped that the problem was somewhat resolved.

Yesterday I closed Firefox, rebooted the PC, and opened Firefox again. It crashed. So i tried to start it in recovery mode. It crashed again. I tried "refreshing" Firefox (and this created a new profile without noscript: seeing that the last time I was easily able to open Firefox simply by disabling Noscript, I did hope that this would solve the problem). it crashed again. I tried upgrading Firefox to the last version. It crashed again, and again, and again, no matter what i did.

In that time, I could easily start firefox with my secondary "light firefox profile" that has only a single window with 6 open tabs. And I could do it in a new profile, without importing old tabs. But when I tried to restore the old sessions, it crashed.

After A LOT of crashed I finally solved the problem by:
1) Reinstalling firefox (I don't know if this was necessary, it was one of the things I tried)
2) Creating a new empty profile (closing the profile manager after creating it)
3) I did copy-paste just the essential files (to recover bookmarks, passwords and few other things), and I did some basic customization, in particular I did check the "resume old session" box.,
4) After checking that that profile worked (i.e. that I didn't pass any broken file), I closed firefox and copy-pasted the sessionstore file from a backup 1 month old (this procedure did not work when I tried at first to use the sessionstore file from the last time), and re-started Firefox.
5) when Firefox started, INSTEAD of crashing it told me that had some problem recovering the old sessions, so it FINALLY opened the window to choose what to recover, and I did remove the check-mark from around one thousand tabs that I didn't need (chosen one by one, it took really a long time...). At that point Firefox started normally.
6) I emptied the history of the closed tabs to make the sessionstore file even smaller, I did touch iron and I tried closing Firefox, rebooting, and opening it again.
7) Re-installed noscript, importing that old configuration file from that month-old backup. Then I did close and reopen firefox again, and It seems that at this time the problem is solved.

It's solved... but by returning firefox to an earlier state, so I can't investigate the problem. The fact that the problem persisted even after removing noscript make me think that the problem was not directly tied to no-script, but the fact that two weeks ago i was able to start firefox by disabling noscript make me think that somehow noscript made it just a little worse two weeks ago, enough to make the difference between "crash" and "not crash".

Anyway, the problem now is solved, at least at the moment. Sorry to have taken your time without being able at the end to give you any useful information...

Thank you for the update and good luck