Amazon.com Firefox Incompatibility
ISSUE: images-amazon.com when enabled in NoScript cause Firefox slow to browse Amazon.com, constant refreshing, memory consumption increase, and instability.
SOLUTION: This is a problem that only the Amazon devs can resolve. It is due to broken JavaScript. Although Chrome tolerates the broken JavaScript better than Firefox, giving up the protection offered by NoScript should not be considered.
From Amazon.com Forum
By Mr BigSpender, 17-Apr-2015 13:45 PDT
I'm now doing most of the online shopping on other websites because browsing through Amazon is a pain.The page keeps refreshing itself after it's completely loaded.The RAM usage spikes.A single Amazon page slows down the whole browser.I tried refreshing Firefox and using a new profile without addons but still had the issue.
- Thank you J. Mackey ! I installed NoScript addon and blocked "images-amazon.com". I don't see images on the homepage now, but the images on other pages work just fine. I can search for products without an issue. The site is very quick now. No more buffering and constant loading. Thanks again !!!
- This appears to have been caused by an incompatibility in certain Firefox versions. I just updated from 38.0.1 to 38.0.5 and the problem immediately went away. I'd recommend anyone having trouble with loading javascript to try updating and see if it helps. It wasn't mentioned in the Firefox release notes but it appears to have fixed the issue. You still get the crazy, rapid page re-loading, but it doesn't continue indefinitely (it lasts about 5 seconds for me). Also, the browser doesn't slow to a crawl.
NOTE: Updating from 38.0.1 to 38.0.5 does not resolve issue. Once "images-amazon.com" is allowed in NoScript, every page begins to refresh constantly and browser slows down.
When images-amazon.com is blocked, the site is not fully functional. Wishlists no longer work correctly. Additional product images no longer work.
Enabling ssl-images-amazon.com is harmless, does not cause the refreshing issue. However, does not enable those broken features.
By Stalkholm, 09-May-2015 00:51 PDT
The problem seems to have to do with images-amazon.com, and ssl-images-amazon.com . If you block those with NoScript or the equivalent the frequent reloading stops. That's the good news. The bad news is that blocking images-amazon.com and ssl-images-amazon.com also breaks the site. So it's a coin flip, do you want to break Amazon in an effort to fix it which in turn breaks the site, or just leave the site broken.
I seem to recall reading that the certificates for images-amazon.com expired on a date before their creation, this in turn confuses the java script since the certificate expires in negative days. Or something to that effect.
Amazon, please fix this.
Edit: This is to say that this problem is not unique, not isolated and IS reproducible. Max, you're not alone in being irritated.
Edit 2: Did some hunting and checking, it looks like there are some problems with the Javascript associated with images-amazom.com. If we paste the contents of https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/nav2/gamma/share-with-friends-js-new/share-with-friends-js-new-share-2043.js._V157885514_.js into http://www.jshint.com we get 52 warnings, the last of which is simply "65 Too many errors. (73% scanned)." and then the logging stops.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/browser-scripts/site-wide-js-1.2.6-beacon/site-wide-6851225134._V1_.js fairs worse in http://www.jshint.com , returning "531 Too many errors. (19% scanned)."
Here's the long and short of it: Someone needs to clean up the JavaScript files associated with ssl-images-amazon.com and images-amazon.com , they're a mess. A good place to start is plugging their contents in at JSHint as I did. I don't know the first damn thing about JavaScript or I'd fix it myself. If this were a brick and mortar store I would point out that your circuits are overloaded and you need to hire an electrician before the whole shop burns down.
