Automatically Stop Sites From Loading Indefinitely In Firefox With KillSpinners

A lot of times it happens that the web page you’re trying to reach keeps loading for an indefinite period of time. On the webmaster’s side, it’s usually an indication of poor site optimization, excessive use of scripts, quirky server response time, or many other reasons. While on the user front, it causes several issues, including excessive use of internet bandwidth and system resources being the worst of the bunch. Of course, you can manually stop a website from further loading via clicking the Stop button on your web browser, but if it’s a constant issue you’re facing with a website that you regularly visit, then you may want an automatic solution. This is where KillSpinners for Mozilla Firefox comes to the rescue. It is a small add-on for Firefox that prevents pages from loading for an excesive amount of time by overriding the default load pattern of a website with a user-specified time interval.

This is how KillSpinners works: Let’s say you set the time interval for allowing sites to load to 20 seconds, then any website that doesn’t stop ‘spinning’ (in reference to the spinner in its tab while its loading) during that time will be automatically stopped from loading further by KillSpinners. The extension is very easy to use, and handles everything on its on.

KillSpinners kicks in when it notices that a website hasn’t stopped loading after 30 seconds, the default timeout of the extension. A notification is also shown beneath the URL bar stating that KillSpinners has prevented the page from further loading. You can modify the default time interval to however you prefer from the add-on’s Options screen.

KillSpinners_Notification

To do that, open Options from the ‘Add-ons’ menu of Firefox, and look for the line that states ‘Timeout before stopping load’. 30 seconds is the default time, but you may want to increase or decrease this value depending on your internet connection speed. For example, if you have a very fast internet connection, you may not need to have a high value here.

Besides the timeout parameter, you can also toggle the notification option of the add-on, and add certain websites that you don’t want to be overridden by default, to the Exceptions list. Exceptions can prove useful for websites that you know take a bit longer to load but don’t have any loading issues otherwise.

KillSpinners_Options