Ah, I see the guess case one is caused by changing the settings in the UI outside of the tests (because they share cookies, of course).

I guess Chrome and my version of Firefox both have higher recursion limits, though. :) Does it say in the console where in the code it's looping? Because if these simple/singly-nested tests are blowing up, I'd like to know if we're using the tape library incorrectly somehow.

Indeed, tests fail with Firefox/Archlinux whereas they pass with any Blink-based browser.

It is not looping. It can either stop on too much recursion error or Stack overflow error.
Where in the code depends on compiled scripts and browser usage.

IMHO, it is still an issue of JavaScript implementation of tape for nested tests. I cannot find the link again, but I recall a similar issue for a large number of (not-nested) tests which has been fixed a long time ago.

Sorry, looping was a poor word choice. I'm able to reproduce something with node --stack-size=500 root/static/scripts/tests/node-runner.js but that seems like a very low limit for a web browser and I can't make sense of it right away.