The Safari freeze issue, lets fix this

[JesperA]

Ok, sure, the topic was a little bit of a clickbait because we cant actually fix this ourself but we CAN contact Apple, or atleast all of us that is experience this issue can atleast send our feedback to:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html

This is getting very frustrating, several times per day i need to force reboot 2 of my Macs (Late 2009 iMac and the latest rMBP), the only Mac i have that is not freezing when i am using Safari is a early 2008 MBP, kinda weird, the oldest Mac i have works flawlessly in El Cap.

I have seen several threads about this issue in various forums, there is one active thread about it on Macrumors and several replies about ut in the El Cap bug thread so i am not alone.

The bug is kinda weird because the Safari freezes the computer, kinda, the music still plays, the videos still plays and i can move my pointer but it does not register ANY mouseclicks/taps.

So, everyone that has this problem & don´t have send some feedback to Apple, please do it, explain the issue and your hardware setup.


UPDATE 2016-11-30

From https://discussions.apple.com/message/30969257?start=270&tstart=0
---

*** IMPORTANT — PLEASE READ ***

I have received a new response from the Apple Developer Bug Reporting Team, after I asked for more information regarding why the original bug report for this issue had been closed.

Sadly, Apple has confirmed that there is NO PLANNED FIX for this bug. I repeat: Apple has closed this issue in their internal system with a note saying they do not plan to ever fix it.

If you are affected by this issue, I would now encourage you to email Apple executives directly. Be sure to mention the original Apple bug ID #26003116, and petition them to not abandon their customers.

- Craig Federighi, SVP Software Engineering: federighi@apple.com
- Phil Schiller, SVP Wordwide Marketing: schiller@apple.com

 

[Alrescha]

The bug is kinda weird because the Safari freezes the computer, kinda, the music still plays, the videos still plays and i can move my pointer but it does not register ANY mouseclicks/taps.

And this is not just an application problem, right? When this happens neither Command-TAB nor Option-Command-ESC have any effect?

A.

 

[JesperA]

And this is not just an application problem, right? When this happens neither Command-TAB nor Option-Command-ESC have any effect?

A.

Nope, nothing works, you cant tab, cmd+tab or bring up expose/mission control with 3 finger swipe. You are locked on to Safari and cant switch away from it. The background processes is probably still working since the music and video is still playing. SMB & AFP to the Mac that is in a freeze state is still working.

 

[Alrescha]

SMB & AFP to the Mac that is in a freeze state is still working.

OK. I am sorry but I have not had that kind of problem for a very long time. If you would like to avoid the hard resets, you can enable Remote Login in System Preferences/Sharing - that would let you ssh into the stuck Mac and either kill Safari or reboot the system.

A.

 

[Ritsuka]

Weird. Do you use some third-party mouse driver or something like that?

 

[JesperA]

OK. I am sorry but I have not had that kind of problem for a very long time. If you would like to avoid the hard resets, you can enable Remote Login in System Preferences/Sharing - that would let you ssh into the stuck Mac and either kill Safari or reboot the system.

A.

I have tried logging into my iMac from my rMBP with ARD and from finder with the "screen sharing" button when connecting to the iMac but it does not work, it does not connect, i don't get the beachball but the remote login have a loading icon, its stuck there and does not connect. It connects in 1ms if the iMac is not in a freeze state.

Weird. Do you use some third-party mouse driver or something like that?

On the iMac i use Logitech Control Center, and nothing on the rMBP but i really doubt that is the issue since both Mac:s crashes just as often and i use Apple Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad on the iMac, no HID works while the Mac is in its freeze state, the only HID input that works is moving the mouse pointer around on the screen.

 

[NoBoMac]

Before writing off third-party anything as not being the cause: what happens when boot into safe-mode, and, what happens if you create a new user account, with none of your standard things starting and no Safari extensions being used?

Flakey extensions have been an issue for me in the past.

Or: disabled SIP and installed some customization program, kernel extension, or some other 3rd party program that does not install without SIP disabled? Might be some real hack-y program and finally showing its true colors.

 

[Alrescha]

I have tried logging into my iMac from my rMBP with ARD and from finder with the "screen sharing"

I understand, and I do not expect that to work. "Remote Login" in the Sharing tab refers to SSH, a command-line interface that should work even if your screen is stuck. Think of it as remote Terminal. If you are not familiar with Terminal then it may not be of great use to you - but in a pinch you could log in and type:

sudo shutdown -r now

and try to reboot the machine cleanly without having to power it off.

A.

 

[JesperA]

Well, the 3 Macs i mentioned in my first post was post freshly installed 4 weeks ago with latest El Cap. The iMac and rMBP both had this problem before the fresh install, i have made some app installs on my iMac since it is my workstation but the rMBP is vanilla, still both freezes just as much. It is hard not to rule out third party apps or extension when one of my Macs is 100% vanilla.


iMac:

The only "extensions" in system preference pane is Java and Logitech Control Center.

Here is my apps, nothing unusual, 6 apps is making obvious "hooks" in the OS: WD Drive manager, Adobe Creative Cloud, VMware Fusion, smcFanControl, HyperDock and Karabiner. I probably missed some apps that also uses some form of extension:

So if anyone else have the same freezing issue, what apps do we have in common?

But as i said, my rMBP has no apps or extension at all, just a fresh install of latest El Cap and still freezes just as much.

I understand, and I do not expect that to work. "Remote Login" in the Sharing tab refers to SSH, a command-line interface that should work even if your screen is stuck. Think of it as remote Terminal. If you are not familiar with Terminal then it may not be of great use to you - but in a pinch you could log in and type:

sudo shutdown -r now

and try to reboot the machine cleanly without having to power it off.

A.

Yep, thanks for the suggestion, i will try that the next time my iMac freezes. I am connected to my iMac now through SSH but if i remember correctly it did not work last time.

Its possible to send UNIX commands via ARD too but did not work last time either.

But yeah, i will try again next freeze

 

[\-V-/]

Well there's your problem ... you're not using English! Just kidding.

 

[JesperA]

Ok, so now i had my iMac on for about 30 minutes when it froze, usually i manage to get a couple of hours work before it freezes.

I made a video (with potato quality), the video doesn't really say anything more than what has already been said in this thread but i thought i make a video anyway, for visual confirmation or whatever.

Warning: I have not listened to the audio in the video yet since i hate hearing my own voice, you will hate it to, your ears will bleed, maybe you will even throw your computer out of the window

Its heard, it freezes is seemingly random, its not reproducible so it is really hard to pinpoint the issue. I dont get any crash report either so yeah, maybe there is some app log, error log or crash log somewhere that i can look and see if there is any report from Safari when it crashed/froze?

 

[saboteur]

I have the same exact problem. Safari blocks the computer, force quit don't work. No extensions, no heird software. Tried a clean install, installed the beta updates to see if the issue is resolved, but Nothing works. I'm out of ideas.

 

[JOMANI]

Same problem here. Safari locks everything up. What to do?

 

[cabbageman]

I had the exact same problem with Safari (or even the whole system) freezing, except for I almost managed to "isolate" the issue. I noticed that it happens mostly when I have YouTube open or whenever I try to close some of the active tabs (completely random websites open). This would typically occur after my system has been on for a while (typically between a couple of hours and 2-3 days). I used to reboot my Mac twice a month or so, but since El Capitan was installed it became almost an everyday task.

This weird behaviour meant that most of the times I was stuck with doing hard resets. On a number of occasions I waited long enough so that I could at least force quit Safari, but after relaunching it the whole experience was very laggy so effectively I had to restart anyway. I contacted Apple Support quite a few times but none of their suggestions worked. In the end, I just backed up my files, wiped my disk and reverted to Yosemite (10.10.5) using the Internet Recovery Mode (my Mac came with Yosemite preinstalled).

Now everything "just works" again, but I have wasted so much time troubleshooting I almost felt like I was using Windows again. Just for the record, I have the same version of Safari now (9.0.3) and it doesn't freeze or crash under Yosemite. So it's apparently an El Cap issue. I don't think I'll be "upgrading" to anything Apple releases soon unless they start taking the quality of their new software releases more seriously.

 

[JOMANI]

I had the exact same problem with Safari (or even the whole system) freezing, except for I almost managed to "isolate" the issue. I noticed that it happens mostly when I have YouTube open or whenever I try to close some of the active tabs (completely random websites open). This would typically occur after my system has been on for a while (typically between a couple of hours and 2-3 days). I used to reboot my Mac twice a month or so, but since El Capitan was installed it became almost an everyday task.

This weird behaviour meant that most of the times I was stuck with doing hard resets. On a number of occasions I waited long enough so that I could at least force quit Safari, but after relaunching it the whole experience was very laggy so effectively I had to restart anyway. I contacted Apple Support quite a few times but none of their suggestions worked. In the end, I just backed up my files, wiped my disk and reverted to Yosemite (10.10.5) using the Internet Recovery Mode (my Mac came with Yosemite preinstalled).

Now everything "just works" again, but I have wasted so much time troubleshooting I almost felt like I was using Windows again. Just for the record, I have the same version of Safari now (9.0.3) and it doesn't freeze or crash under Yosemite. So it's apparently an El Cap issue. I don't think I'll be "upgrading" to anything Apple releases soon unless they start taking the quality of their new software releases more seriously.

Thanks for sharing Cabbage!

 

[JesperA]

cabbageman thanks for the input, yes i have noticed that Safari often freezes on content heavy sites, most of them have several embedded YouTube videos so maybe there is some relevance to this issue.

However, i also get some freezes when i just have been scrolling on a site for a while, like on Instagram when scrolling several miles through a hashtag, their infinity scroll is based on JavaScript (i think) so maybe Safari freezes while handling some JavaScript events but that would be kinda weird but since it seems impossible to pinpoint the cause of the freezes its hard to rule anything out.

Anyways, some good news atleast: I have gone through all the public betas of 10.11.4 now and the freezes persist up until Beta 5, i installed Beta 6 a couple of days ago and have not got any system freezes so far, i DID however get the beachball while scrolling on a site (i did not get any beachball on the previous freezes), the beachball persisted for 30 seconds and i couldn't click on anything while i had the beachball so it kinda acted like the previous freezes, after that 30 seconds i atleast got my right click back but left click did not work, not on my MX Revolution or Magic Trackpad (neither hard clicks or taps), i got my left clicks back after doing the mission control swipe gesture.

So maybe there has been some changes in Beta 6, indirectly or directly to solve this issue.

Knock on wood (i bet i will get the same freeze again 10 minutes after posting this )

Edit: Yes, ignore me, just got the good old system freeze while scrolling in Safari

 

[tstoyc]

Same issue here, iMac late 2009.
I have had this issue for easily half a year and it is a productivity killer.
Today is bad, I think I had to restart 5 or 6 times.
It happens when I use Safari with the trackpad, at random times, mostly associated
with mouse-over an image or video...
It reminds of the blue screen of death in the 90s windows, it is so-so bad.
I am seriously considering switching to Linux for good, I find it incredible that Apple
does not know about this issue and does not fix it..

 

[leman]

Is there a way to reproduce this? I haven't really had or heard of any such issue with Safari on any of our 10.11 machines.

What I know of is an bug in the window server that will cause it to crash occasionally: this results in the symptoms you describe. It restarts automatically after 30 seconds or so. However, I haven't encountered this bug in over a month now, it might have been finally fixed in 10.11.4

 

[DVA_Mac]

Hello,
I'm new to the forum and my wife and I have 2 mid-2007 iMacs which have run like champs since the day we bought them However, we upgraded one of the two iMacs to El Capitan four weeks ago and now that device is experiencing the exact issue shown in JesperA's video and discussed in this forum, i.e., multiple times per day the system freezes except for the mouse, and only holding the power button down shuts the device off. I've run disk utility and also see no hw errors.

So after reading several web articles is the bottom line of the situation that I should back-out El Captan on that device and go back to an older OS?

 

[Antonnn]

this issue is still not fixed:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macbook-pro-2015-with-osx-el-capitan-10-11-4-system-wide-safari-freeze.1963711/

 

[JesperA]

Yeah, this is getting really annoying, the iMac is my work computer running many productivity programs/apps and it is a real pain in the *** to have to force shutdown the computer several times per day and then restore every app and its app-state to the same state as before the "crash"/freeze.

I have not found a way to reproduce this issue, Safari always freezing for me when i am scrolling, for some others it is while switching or closing tabs and it is not connected to an obvious event, thus not reproducible.

Dont think it is an window server issue, a window server crash; crashes kinda gracefully will normal error handling and restart of services, atleast all the times (just 2-3 times so maybe my observations are wrong) i have had any issue with it.

I have no solution to this other than using Chrome alot more (but i use Apple Keychain for some sites and dont want to use those password in chrome so i am kinda stuck with Safari for some tasks), also i have restarted Safari every 1-2 hours, that seem to minimize the occurrence of system wide freezes thanks to Safari.

 

[DVA_Mac]

Yeah, this is getting really annoying, the iMac is my work computer running many productivity programs/apps and it is a real pain in the *** to have to force shutdown the computer several times per day and then restore every app and its app-state to the same state as before the "crash"/freeze.

I have not found a way to reproduce this issue, Safari always freezing for me when i am scrolling, for some others it is while switching or closing tabs and it is not connected to an obvious event, thus not reproducible.

Dont think it is an window server issue, a window server crash; crashes kinda gracefully will normal error handling and restart of services, atleast all the times (just 2-3 times so maybe my observations are wrong) i have had any issue with it.

I have no solution to this other than using Chrome alot more (but i use Apple Keychain for some sites and dont want to use those password in chrome so i am kinda stuck with Safari for some tasks), also i have restarted Safari every 1-2 hours, that seem to minimize the occurrence of system wide freezes thanks to Safari.

[doublepost=1459199101][/doublepost]Using the TimeMachine, I've rolled back to 10.9.5 but the problem remains; and moreover, both my iMacs now freeze (both running 10.9.5) when using Safari, but not when using Chrome. So, I agree with JesperA that Safari is triggering the issue. As for time between freezes, This morning I accidentally visited one site with Sarfari and the system froze. Hence, I'm speculating some sort of Mac security patch has yielded a glitch the Safari/OS interaction; and if so, unless Apple addresses it, we're toast when using Safari.

 

[pcgeek12345]

This issue has plagued me since the 10.11 betas. This is ridiculous that it has been FOUR update releases, and this issue is not fixed yet. Really has me concerned for the Apple of the future. I have been reporting it via Feedback Assistant every time it happens. Seems to occur less on 10.11.4 than previous versions, but it still exists...

 

[peixesloucos]

I am with 10.11.4 on my MBP 15" (Late 2011). Since a month, I have the freeze problem. I do not have many apps on my MBP and I think the problem happens mainly when I am using Safari. I can confirm that I am not even running any videos etc. Just opening google maps...

In my case, my MBP do not boot. When I press the turn on button the only thing that happens is MBP getting hot, battery drain. After some minutes I am able to boot. Meanwhile I always try SMC reset (shift control option power) but I am not sure if this helps.

Anyone having similar issues?

Any solution, yet?

 

[iMas70]

I've been dealing with this for a few weeks. Usually when I'm scrolling. Pretty much everything will freeze but I can still move the pointer. At least I'm not the only one and there is a change we'll see this fixed someday.