Unresponsive script freezing browser

[thorny locust]

I just got this message on a snopes message board page -- it was on a thread I had opened on a separate tab from the "new posts" page.

Warning: unresponsive script

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, open the script in the debugger, or let the script continue.

Script: chrome://global/content/bindings/popup.xml:223

The "stop script" button wouldn't work, and the entire browser was frozen; I had to force quit the browser and restart it.

I wasn't in chrome, and didn't have chrome open. I'm using Firefox (just updated yesterday) on a Mac.

I've occasionally had this happen on other sites; generally I just quit going to that site. I don't want to quit going to snopes, though.

ETA: It just happened again. I had tried opening one tab at a time, including the thread that had the problem the first time, with no problems. I then tried opening a batch of tabs at once (which may or may not be relevant; that's how I usually browse snopes, and it never used to be a problem) and it happened again almost immediately, although with a different thread and a different script. This script had a massively long address, not all of which I was going to bother typing (I can't seem to copy from the warning box); but it started with http://googleads.g.doubleclicknet/

I'm going to go do something else for a while now.

[GenYus234]

Did you notice which ad (if any) was running when you got that? My guess would be that it was a bad ad.

[ganzfeld]

It's almost certainly an ad because the board has little scripting except some helpful scripts in the editor. In Firefox, the NoScript plugin can be used to selectively block scripts from sites or allow only the scripts that are explicitly from a site (not served from ads, for example).

Turning off scripts reduces the visibility of many ads which support the site but there's a tradeoff with the site becoming unusable because of bad scripts and other weird stuff going on these days. One still gets plain old banner image ads and most linked ads.

[thorny locust]

Did it again while I was reading this. I went and looked up no-script and installed it, and then discovered that portions of these boards weren't working -- for instance, I couldn't get to any but the newest posts because "quick links" wasn't working. So I've allowed snopes.com, and will see what happens. -- the no-script bar now says "scripts partially allowed, 1/2 (snopes.com)"; I'll hope it's not also allowing whatever ad was causing the problem.

I hate to not allow ads from snopes because of the issue of its not supporting the site; but the problem's making the site entirely unusable otherwise, so I think I'm stuck with it. Maybe as you said, ganz, it won't block all the ads.

ETA: I'm still getting at least an occasional banner ad. And the freezeup scripts have stopped -- I hope not just by coincidence.