About those "slow script" messages

I've gotten a couple of those lately and wondered what they were -- assuming the worst. They happen when you're browsing and a page is taking a long time to load. The New York Times explains:

Web developers typically use scripts for working with ActiveX controls, performing database queries, running Adobe Flash animations, displaying menus or serving up advertisements on the page you just landed on. Most browsers, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari, have a built-in alter timer that goes off whenever a script running on a Web page exceeds the amount of time the browser has given it to perform — usually from 5 to 10 seconds.

Web pages that need to download a lot of data like video and animated graphics often trip the script alarm. The browser alert box gives you the option to stop running that script so that the browser doesn’t get hung up waiting for it to finish. Some scripts are just complex and slow, but some are badly written and slip into an endless loop.


Stopping the script shouldn’t cause any problems, but the page may not work properly. If you want to try some troubleshooting, press Control+F5 to refresh the page and see if the error message reappears. If you have a lot of browser tabs open to pages that may also be running scripts to refresh mailboxes or automatically update themselves, try closing those as well before reloading the page to see if the error message goes away.

Security software my be slowing things down as well, especially if you have it set to investigate JavaScript and other Web-page code for malicious activity. If you do, try disabling that setting temporarily to see if the slow-script error goes sway. If it does, you may just have ignore the warning and wait a little longer for the software to scan.

Microsoft has more information on the error, along with a workaround that simply lengthens the amount of time before the error message appears here.