Problems with Safari in Ventura

[Speed38]

2020 iMac, SSD, macOS 13.1

Seemingly out of the blue, Safari is balking at loading certain sites, even pages at Apple, like this one:

Install and validate fonts in Font Book on Mac

In Font Book on your Mac, install, download, or validate fonts to use in apps, and resolve font issues.

support.apple.com

I am seeing two types of errors:
1. Bad Request. Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
2. Bad Message 400. reason: Illegal character CNTL=0xb

Someone suggested that #2 might indicate a corrupted font so I want to FontBook.app, selected all the fonts there and Font Book returned: “No problems were found. 336 font files passed. These fonts should be safe to use.”

The problem persists and, in every case, when I copy and past the URL that won't load in Safari into to another browser, Opera, it works just fine.

Would welcome any suggestions worth trying to fix this.

 

[Boyd01]

FWIW, that link works fine for me with Safari and Monterey on my 2018 Mini.

 

[MBAir2010]

Same here works fine on MacBook Air M1 Ventura Safari latest software

Try removing the cache on the safari developer task bar sections

 

[Speed38]

@MBAir 2010 - Thanks. I just did that. Let's see if that ends the problem. Promise to return to this thread in a few days and report if the problem is solved or not.

 

[manofthematch]

Do you use an Adblocker?
Do you use VPN software?
Do you have some Antivirus software oder other "security" stuff installed?

Disable it (and possibly other extensions) to test if behavior changes.

Also, delete all cookies (internet data).

 

[Speed38]

@manofthematch.

I do ue an adblocker, have done so since forever, never been a problem.
Do not use VPN software.
No antivirus on my Mac.

It is beginning to look like going to Safari > Develop > Empty caches may have done the trick.

However, also booted in Safe Mode, and that may have had something to do with the problem no longer appearing.

If it comes back...I'll be back.

 

[Speed38]

Four days and no repeat of the problem: it was either Safari > Develop > Empty caches or restarting in Safe Mode that may have done the trick.

 

[T Coma]

So does this mean every time a website doesn’t load in safari, the user has to empty these caches? I started using only Apple software on my M1 MBP (Safari, iWork, etc) and only loaded third party software when necessary. Brave was the first replacement I added, as Safari balks at a surprising number of websites, and Brave has yet to require any maintenance. The only thing that keeps me using safari is the Apple continuity feature, but honestly I may be doing that more for the concept than in actual practice.

Unfortunately I’ve never kept a list of the pages that failed on Safari to test after clearing caches. I just jump to Brave and keep moving. But either way, an extra step is generally disruptive to the workflow.

 

[Speed38]

@T Coma = I dunno about having to empty those caches on a regular basis. Like you, I use Safari because of its continuity feature; it melds so nicely with Mail/Messages/Keychain/etc. it will be interesting to see how long I can go before I start having trouble loading pages again.

 

[Boyd01]

So does this mean every time a website doesn’t load in safari, the user has to empty these caches? I started using only Apple software on my M1 MBP (Safari, iWork, etc) and only loaded third party software when necessary.

As a developer, I'm constantly clearing my cache to test new code (otherwise, safari doesn't see the changes). There could be many reasons why a site doesn't load, but one of them might be that the site's software was updated since your last visit and Safari hasn't noticed. So, it loads code from the cache which no longer works because of changes to the actual code and resources. This is a bigger problem with sites you visit frequently, because Safai assumes the code hasn't changed.

I use Safari primarily but also Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera for testing my code. There's a guy who uses my site a lot with Edge on Windows 10. Whenever I make a change, he seems to have a hard time fully clearing cached code. I test it with Edge in a Windows VM and can't usually duplicate his issues, but that's probably because I don't use the site heavily that way.

Anyway, most of the time it will do no harm to clear the cache and it's worth a try.

 

[Speed38]

I guess this is the "curse" of bookmarking sites and, being of "a certain age", I bookmark tons of sites so I won't forget them.
I have noted that that sometimes when a site doesn't load and I have it bookmarked and have not been back to it for years, if it balks I delete the bookmark, restart Safari, go back to the site and it reloads just fine.

These most recent balks were definitely, however, not linked to old bookmarks: they were Apple support articles.