#4 / 6 rate

Block Unreachable Scripts

620 users

2017-09-26

em_te

[email protected]

This extension is being deprecated because it doesn't follow Chrome extension best practices.

Extension Information

5 star

29%

4 star

29%

3 star

14%

2 star

29%

1 star

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Description

Prevent unreachable servers from stalling websites by disabling their scripts for 5 minutes if they previously could not load.

Some websites load JavaScript from third-party servers that are sometimes unreachable (because of firewalls/DNS/bad SSLs/Google down/etc.). This will cause the website to stall (freeze) as it waits for that server to respond. The only recourse is to wait patiently for that request to time out, before the website can continue loading.

This extension will monitor those failed JavaScript requests and will skip over them if any websites try to load from those servers again. This prevents the website from stalling again. The block will only occur for 5 minutes in case the server is restored later.

Failed requests can be viewed in the toolbar button, which shows which URLs were blocked and how long the block will last. The toolbar button only appears when scripts are blocked.

Note that this extension does not target anyone and has no black-list or white-list. Blocking only occurs if the server was previously unreachable and therefore the content would not have loaded anyway.

Test the effects of unreachable servers here: http://tinyurl.com/test-blocking-js

Reviews

Dawda Green

I have notices that it can make several pages blank. The site loads but either it's blank or corrupted.

Stanton McCandlish

Good idea but essentially unusable in its present implementation. It makes a large number of websites mostly or partially unusable, sometimes starting right at their login pages. This needs an adjustable global timeout, and per-site timeout adjustment. E.g., if a slow site sometimes takes 20 sec. to load, I would want to set maybe a 40-sec. timeout for elements on that page, and not block any of them unless they take longer than that. For a site that almost always loads in 3-5 sec., I might set it at 10 sec. (That extra padding will account for my typical VPN usage.) I can't tell what the defaults are, but I'm guessing around 5 sec., since this breaks even pretty basic and quick-to-load sites like LastPass.com (was able to login, but the script to create a new entry from the "+" icon apparently takes a hair too long for Block Unreachable Scripts, so this basic function of the site can't be used at all with this extension enabled (not that I'll be using LastPass much longer anyway, but it's just one example of breakage).