Millions of users around the world use Firefox without any such issue, including myself. Unfortunately, your thread is far too vague to even begin to provide any kind of viable suggestions to you.

The only time that I have ever experienced this issue personally is when I'm working on developing a website and accidentally create an infinite loop in my code. But the entire purpose of that error message is to stop the code from running instead of crashing the entire browser.

In my experience, the most common reasons that standard users will get this error message is if they are running a lot of add-ons that are eating up their computer resources or if they are running Firefox on a computer with insufficient hardware to support the modern resource-heavy websites of today.

Naturally, I'll recommend that you review the support document about this subject, but based on what you've posted, I would assume that you've already read it.

The only other way that I think anyone hear will be able to help you is if you are able to provide crash reports or some kind of troubleshooting information from the system(s) that you are having problems with.

And, this is the usual response. The problem has been the same for more than a decade. But, if I ask for any help, either it is all of the other firefox users who have noted this problem for over a decade, or it's someone technically inclined who says they have never had the experience. So, what am I to do? Not use firefox, very sadly.

It's known as the "a script has become unresponsive browser". A very good reason for people to switch to chrome was to have a browser that doesn't crash all the time. But, I'm becoming increasingly unhappy with chrome and google and I like some of the initiatives that mozilla promotes.

There is no common set of websites to blame. No common set of addons or even no addons that I installed. My computers have generally been pretty beefy multimedia development machines but,there have been many over the decades running various versions of linux or windows. All have shown the same problem when using firefox.

The basic question would be, how does firefox manage to render a computer unresponsive and ultimately hang? How has chrome avoided that problem?

kenned.doll said

The basic question would be, how does firefox manage to render a computer unresponsive and ultimately hang?

The simple answer is that this really shouldn't happen anymore. Because Firefox is designed to keep web content separate from the actual browser itself, even if a website goes unresponsive, for whatever reason, the browser is designed so that it doesn't crash.

If your browser is crashing a lot, there is something else happening that's not related to the core Firefox browser itself. It could be a browser extension, some other piece of software, something wrong with OS, anything really. There are tons of reasons that the browser can crash.

Unfortunately, your thread is far too general. Unless you have some crash reports handy or something other than just "The problem has been the same for more than a decade", there's no possible way that anyone can help you to pinpoint the cause of your problem.

The "unresponsive script" message basically works on a timer. If a specific script takes too long to run, it triggers the message. This allows you to click the "stop" button so that the process running web content from crashing itself and closing your tabs.

Even when you get that message, you should still have full control over everything in the browser, like the menu and stuff like that. If the entire browser is freezing because of that message, in my experience, that's usually related to an extension.

I did some research and struggled to find any posts from within the past year by people experiencing this issue. The few that I was able to find came down to a browser extension issue. The only other thing I can recommend to you is to disable hardware acceleration and see if that makes a difference.

Hope this helps.

As a follow up, out of curiosity, what version of Firefox are you running?