+1. Sent my Firefox 16.0.2 browser into hyperspace on Ubuntu.

Is there a way to just kill an offending tab? Pages like this take over my old-ish hardware so completely that trying to close a tab in the normal way is impossible. It is a design flaw for Firefox to allow any webpage to have this much power. Maybe a setting that forbids any page from consuming more than X% CPU for t time without explicit permission? Killing the whole FF process is far from ideal. I'd be willing to switch browsers if another better handled this issue?

Same here. 16.0.1 Windows 7. CPU didn't max out but it was high and the browser was unusable. I managed to close the tab but the CPU was still high and browser was unresponsive. I had to kill the process.

I've filed a bug regarding this : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=806311 Feel free to add your system information on that bug or describe what you faced or any other constructive input possible there. You can also CC yourself to follow along the progress.

Btw I tried this in the latest Firefox nightly and it seems that the nightly doesn't crash although the CPU usage does go up to 50%, so it seems that this bug has been fixed and will be released in the upcoming stable releases.

Crashed my browser, FF 16.0.1, too. Or rather ate 200% cpu and locked browser, which I then had to kill.