Firefox Unresponsive Script Warning

Oscar Sodani is a founder of Help2Go and owner of Help2Go Networks, an IT consulting firm in the Washington D.C. area. Oscar holds the CISSP certification as well as industry certifications from Microsoft, Cisco and Novell.

When I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 recently, I found that several sites now produced an error pop-up that said: "Warning : Unresponsive script". The message continues: "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete." It then gives you the option to Stop Script or Continue.

This happened most often on sites that used Javascript to give me live updates of current happenings. For me, this meant that the CBS Sportsline GameCenter fantasy baseball site that keeps me updated on my teams' happenings and the current scores stopped working.

Luckily, there's a simple fix. 

• In the Firefox address bar, type about:config and press Enter.
• Scroll down and find the entry that says dom.max_script_run_time
• Double-click on that entry and change the value (the default is 5) to something higher. Most sites recommend 20, but I found that I still received the pop-up warning too often. So I changed it to 1000!
• Click OK.
• Restart Firefox

That should do it! You can try experimenting with different values until you find the one that works best for you. Now I can monitor my fantasy teams in peace!

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