I've hit this problem in the past, albeit rarely, but I got it just now accessing a page which was clearly "Slashdotted". Getting tired of waiting for it to load, I hit the ESC key repeatedly and it did not stop. Hitting the "Stop" button worked fine. I was able to do this repeatedly while the site was overloaded. Playing around more generally with sites loading normally, I can stop pages loading reliably with the "Stop" button while the ESC key frequently does nothing. It seems as though ESC is often ignored. Since I tend to use ESC rather than "Stop", because it is much faster to reach, this behaviour is a nuisance. Is it possible that ESC is being ignored during the "pause to download before rendering" I've read about in other bugs?

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 76495 ***