Peter Staack Product Testimonials & Reviews

I've previously posted about how much I like Chuck Baker's Firefox Environment Backup Extension (a.k.a. FEBE)... It's a great Firefox add-on, that allows you to quickly and easily backup and restore your Firefox profiles, settings, passwords, configurations, plug-ins, and add-ons. However, since upgrading Firefox to version 3.6, FEBE hasn't been working for me. I would activate it, and it would start up, but after some time it cycles the animation but never completes the backup. When I abort the operation, I see a window stating an "unresponsive script" has become an issue, and asks me to continue or quit. Either answer results in FEBE backup failing.

I suspected this could be fixed by configuring the time-out, and a little online research yielded the necessary setting changes. One only has to open a new window or tab in Firefox, and put about:config into the address bar (this allows you access to the full Firefox configuration, so be careful). Once you get past the initial warning, search for the entry "dom.max_chrome_script_run_time". When it comes up, you'll see a string of text and a number. The default seems to be 20. Change this to 60. Close this tab or window, and it'll save the settings.

With this setting change, Firefox is instructed to wait for 60 seconds, before it issues a warning about an unresponsive script. Apparently FEBE sometimes requires more than a 20 second pause, which leads to the error, and breaks functionality. After making this change, FEBE worked like a charm. In some cases, a few more seconds were necessary, so it might take a few changes. Chuck goes into greater detail on his forum (link).

Cross-posted on my LiveJournal: Fix For FEBE (Firefox Environment Backup Extension) "Unresponsive Script" Problem in Firefox 3.6