Good day, I was looking at a news report in Firefox and found my computer hard drive was making noise, indicating a lot of activity for no reason, and my computer was very slow and unresponsive. Other news report pages were jamming and not opening. A notice appeared on my screen saying the page was unresponsive and gave me the option to stop script or debug. Is this a virus? What can I do? My restart has for now fixed the problem.

Running Mint 17.2, 64 Bit.

Just a random firefox fluke, nothing to worry about

Each time I restart and open this page, the problem re-emerges. And the debuger mentions "Blackbox".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/arti...the-christians

http://www.christianpost.com/news/ki...n-need-142658/

Works fine on firefox and google chrome here. Do you have any addons?

As with a lot of problems you may encounter restarting a computer is a nice reflex, after all it "fixes" a lot of things, but you'll learn nothing from it.


If your computer hard drive makes noise or your computer becomes unresponsive then you either have tools that monitor performance continuously ('atop' comes to mind) or you investigate when it happens. The latter may be hard if you can't even get a (CTRL+F[1-8]) terminal window (if you run SSH and have another device that may help) but when you do you at least check system, daemon and Xorg logs and any user directory logs like ~/.xsession-errors and run 'top'. Another default reflex would be to disable Java, Flash and Javascript until explicitly needed using one of the current, maintained common plugins like Policeman or Noscript (or a filtering proxy like Privoxy if you need something OS and browser-agnostic) and hit the SHIFT+F5 key to profile usage (there's no separate "CPU" stats page or XUL Profiler). Only then do you have a clear view of things.


*And while this probably is superfluous I should emphasize nobody should be running stale browser versions nor should anyone run any browser on any OS with Java or Flash enabled by default, period. If this late in this millennium you (the generic "you", mind you) still think otherwise then abandon all Hope ye who browse here...

No, fairly fresh install of Mint, no addons.

I've seen a similar message numerous times in the past. Generally on sites which have a lot of pop-ups and adds. I don't know that there is any connection between in and your hard making noise. Have you tried the sites in a different browser? Does your computer "make noise" when you are engaged in other activities besides browsing?

cookies and such can also lead to system overload, so make sure to (selectively) delete history when closing ff:
about:preferences#privacy