hangs Firefox and Safari

[markjhood]

The demonstration website http://www.coffeeshopphysics.com/articles/2012-12/22_lost_in_hyperbolia/ causes the latest Firefox ESR version 24.5.0 to hang after a few seconds of loading.

With Safari 6.1.4 the initial load is OK, but the then the browser stops rendering and becomes unresponsive as well.

I am running Mac OS X 10.8.5 on a 16GB MacBookPro8,2 laptop (15-inch, early 2011) with an Intel Core i7 / AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024MB. I've never seen this kind of behavior before on this system. What browser/OS is required to run this code?

It would be helpful if the code checked for compatible systems before it loaded into the browser. I lost a number of tabs with work in progress when I took a break to check out your demo.

[jpivarski]

The browser side of it is just Javascript. I tested it with Firefox and Chrome on Linux and OSX before releasing it. My laptop (also a Mac of about the same age) has 4GB of RAM. When I saw the problems you've been having, I tested it on my iPad 2, and it's still fine. It's noticably faster in Chrome than Firefox because it's numerically intensive, which V8's optimistic compilation does a good job of optimizing, but I've never known it to crash Firefox. Since it's canvas-based, the browser might offload some of it to a graphics card, but like I said, it's just Javascript, so I don't know what optimizations the browser attempts.