I disabled all extensions and cleared cache, it had no effect. (The new Safari 12 version of Adblock didn't seem to do anything at all anyway.) Deleting most of my cookies seems to have helped a bit, reduced by 50 percent at most. Still an unacceptable number of crashes, a bunch per hour. My history automatically deletes items after 2 weeks so I doubt that's a problem.
I do tend to keep a lot of browser windows/tabs open. I like to able to come back and finish things I as reading without losing my place. I have windows with tabs on various subjects: news, discussions, researching something I might buy, or researching things I need to fix such as this problem or a home repair, and so forth. I need to be able to find pages and then be able to come back to them later.
I don't see any other way to do it. Creating, finding, and especially deleting bookmarks is
incredibly slow compared to just opening, closing and switching between windows and tabs. Firefox apparently has a "tab suspender" extension that lets you stop running scripts on pages you're not currently looking at, but I find Firefox inferior overall: slower and uglier, with text that is harder to read. Last time I checked there was no such thing available for Safari. I haven't tried Chrome because I don't trust Google in regard to privacy.
I have a number of windows open but minimized to the Dock so Safari doesn't actually open the webpage until I take the window out of the Dock. I'd like to sort through them, just close some of them and make bookmarks for some of them so I can close them-but it's hard to do that when the damn thing keeps crashing as soon as I try.
There really ought to be some better way to keep track of pages I've been viewing without going through the unbelievably slow process of navigating menus and dialog boxes to deal with bookmarks, and especially having to navigate a separate menu system to delete them than you do to create or view them! (Why can't I just right-click a bookmark and delete it? It would be much easier that way.) There should be some quick graphical way to "bookmark" pages similar to the process of opening and closing windows, but without having to have the pages open, running scripts, consuming resources and causing these problems I'm having.
I have written before about this issue in this thread:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...imes-day-becoming-useless-what-to-do.2026763/
My browsing experience has gotten worse and worse with the software updates over the last couple years:
-With El Capitan and earlier, Safari would hang up (unresponsive, with a beachball) sometimes. I would have to force-quit it, and relaunch Safari. Not a big deal.
-When I upgraded to Sierra and continuing with High Sierra, instead of just Safari hanging up, my whole computer would become unresponsive whenever Safari hung up and I would have to force-shutdown the computer and then boot again, remount disk images, reopen applications and documents. Lots of wasted time.
-When I upgraded to Safari 12, they disabled Adblock. This ate up more resources with ad videos and such, making these hangups and shutdowns happen even more. And it makes browsing generally slow and aggravating, annoying me with videos and such and making me click to close ads before viewing a page. This often doubles the time it takes to navigate between different pages looking for things. And it increases heat, fan usage and battery usage compared to running with Adblock. They should have warned us that it would do this.
Now upgrading to Safari 12.1-which was supposedly just a security update that I didn't think would have any ill effects-the crashes are coming multiple times per hour, much more than before. On the plus side though, my whole computer doesn't hang up and require a shutdown. Safari just crashes with no warning and I have to relaunch it. But it's happening all the time and it often causes me to lose things I'm typing.
These recent Safari updates have made me deeply regret when I have neglected to back up beforehand. In the past I have backed up before moving to a new OS version, but it didn't occur to me that just updating Safari could cause serious problems.
It's been almost a month since my last backup I've done a lot of tidying up of unneeded documents and such. I will lose that work, and various new documents (unless I find them and manually copy them) and such if I revert to the backup. So I'd really like to find if there is a way to downgrade to the previous version of Safari. The lack of replies other than yours is making me think there isn't. There seems to be a site "tomsguide" that has a download link for Safari 12.0.1, but I have no idea if that's safe and legit, or if I could install it and keep my bookmarks.
