Safari 14 on Big Sur: How to prevent a webpage from automatically reloading because it was using significant memory?

I had the same problem when watching Disney+ I tried a few different things but finally seemed to have stopped it happening.

I monitored the memory use of the Disney+ tab in Activity monitor.

Under safari > Settings for this website - I turned off "Content Blockers"

I am running Ghostry Lite - so I "Trusted the site"

I am running AdBlock - so I added www.disneyplus.com to the sites allowed to show Ads.

If I do the above and play Disney+ in a separate window the memory usage fluctuates but doesn't grow like it used to. Previously I would get the warning when the tab used around 2.0GB memory. Now it stays between 650Mb-850Mb

I started having this issue the other day on Big Sur 11.1 (20C69) and realised that I'd recently changed my ad blocker from Ka-Block to AdBlock - Ka-Block seems to have quietly crashed in the background, causing various issues - which made me go back to Ka-Block and the issues went away. In short, it could be that popular ad blockers are causing Safari to act up, so it might be worth trying to change that particular piece of software.

scharnks wrote:

Very inconvenient for online classes -- would love if this was fixed. My laptop is brand new and running Big Sur 11.2.1 (just updated to see if it would fix the issue..) I also tried clearing history and cache, but since it is only a few weeks of data I had low hopes of that working, and alas, it is still refreshing in a very stifling and unrefreshing way.

/K

Have you, and others, provided Apple Feedback through their provided Feedback mechanisms? See Product Feedback - Apple

If people don’t provide such Feedback, there is little chance that Apple will change anything.

I would provide my Feedback in the form of a Bug Report, on matters such as this.

In the meantime, there are a couple of things that have been found helpful:

1. Access such web-pages through a browser window with only a single tab: this helps isolate the resource use.
2. Other browsers, such as Google Chrome, don’t seem to have this issue.

I just off a chat with a apple advisor. They told me to turn off all extension through Safari>Preferences...>Extension> and turning them off by clicking the blue boxes on the side.

After implementing these changes, the browser still shows the "webpage is using significant memory" error, but the frequency of reloading was significantly reduced.

MartinAS65 wrote:

Lots of comments re being stuck on Vimeo, and other sites, but no solution.

That’s because there are no solutions available to us, as users.

The problem is:

1. Websites are abusing the internal memory of your browser. This should not happen. Websites should be using Server-Side storage (especially for uploads). Only the offending website can correct this.
2. There are, typically, not browser options to permit this abuse, though some browsers are more permissive than others. (This does provide for a workaround, in many cases. Another potential workaround is to isolate the offending website to its own browser window with no other tabs.)

This is the reason for the Feedback recommendations.

Welcome, MartinAS65, to Apple Support Communities!

Please see my reply to DeepS Tunes, at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252041706?answerId=255064362022#255064362022.

angieet93:

Have you, and others, provided Apple Feedback through their provided Feedback mechanisms? See Product Feedback - Apple

If people don’t provide such Feedback, there is little chance that Apple will change anything.

I would provide my Feedback in the form of a Bug Report, on matters such as this.

In the meantime, there are a couple of things that have been found helpful:

1. Access such web-pages through a browser window with only a single tab: this helps isolate the resource use.
2. Other browsers, such as Google Chrome, don’t seem to have this issue.

Welcome, PP38, to Apple Support Communities!

It will all depend upon the way the “streaming” site has been programmed.

1. Websites are not supposed to use large amounts of browser storage: they are supposed to use Server Side storage.
2. Unfortunately, many websites have gotten increasingly lazy about using Browser memory.

Perhaps contributing to this problem are the following:

1. Many streaming sites used to use Flash for such purposes, but with the demise of Flash (at the beginning of this year, even though they were forewarned three and a half years ago, they may be new to the idea of streaming directly to browsers using HTML5.
2. There are some web-browsers that have very “relaxed” standards about the use of your computer resources: these browsers are well known resource “hogs”, but they may have contributed to websites being lazy in their use of browser resources. (Google Chrome is one well known resource “hog”.)

Have you, and others, provided Apple Feedback through their provided Feedback mechanisms? See Product Feedback - Apple.

If people don’t provide such Feedback, there is little chance that Apple will change anything.

I would provide my Feedback in the form of a Bug Report, on matters such as this.

In the meantime, there are a couple of things that have been found helpful:

1. Access such web-pages through a browser window with only a single tab: this helps isolate the resource use.
2. Other browsers, such as Google Chrome, don’t seem to have this issue. (Resource “hogs.)

Hello, I don't know if this has already been solved, but I kept receiving the same banner that forced the page to automatically reload; this happened in browsing video content (e.g. lectures) or in scrolling websites with continuous video content playing (e.g. Reddit).

I refused to think my MBA M1 with 8 GB of RAM couldn't handle these tasks, since my 2012 iMac with 8 GB does it effortlessly. Hence, I thought it was some sort of bug related to Safari.

I seem to have solved it by emptying the cache and restarting the browser! Now everything works fine and I haven't had any problems since!

Hope this helps!

Jacopo

I don't know if you are still having this issue, but I know I am experiencing this whilst watching movies via Disney+. Some temporary solutions I found to this was to:

1. Download Google Chrome: I gave this a try and not only was there no reloading, it used significantly less battery life on my Mac. I don't know why this may be the case and I doubt its due to better software optimization but it worked.

I hope this assists you or anyone else that is searching for a solution for this issue. I also hope Apples does address this in a future build of MacOS or Safari.

Have a good one!

[Edited by Moderator]

I confirm that this is happening just with Big Sur Safari! In fact, I have a brand new MBA M1 8-core 8GB RAM and a late-2012 iMac i5 8GB RAM running Catalina. Surprisingly, same tasks on iMac cause no issues!

The problem is not the automatic reloading per se, the problem is the bug which causes huge memory usage (with activity monitor you can see RAM usage starts to rise without stopping!). Moreover, one or two times has happened that the page didn’t reload and the computer FREEZED and restarted because of RAM saturation!

I also confirm that with Chrome nothing of the above is happening! Nor it’s a RAM usage optimization in general, since I can EASILY edit a video, edit a picture in Photoshop, while listening a song on Spotify and playing a YouTube video on Chrome!

Apple has to solve this!

For Zoom If you are having the link of the recorded lecture you can just copy paste that link into chrome and continue watching the lecture seamlessly on the lastest update of MacOS Big Sur.

OperaStarrOS:

Have you reported this as a bug to Apple’s Safari Feedback page?

That is the very best method to accelerate any fix for this issue.

Unfortunately, it does sound like you’ll need to use another web browser as a workaround, for the time being.

Answer from the support: There is no fix for this atm. I submitted feedback on the issue.

I have Big Sur on the new M1 with 16GB so it appears to be standard behavior of Safari that is not related to the performance of your computer.

lilmizeh:

Have you, and others, provided Apple Feedback through their provided Feedback mechanisms? See Product Feedback - Apple

If people don’t provide such Feedback, there is little chance that Apple will change anything.

I would provide my Feedback in the form of a Bug Report, on matters such as this.

In the meantime, there are a couple of things that have been found helpful:

1. Access such web-pages through a browser window with only a single tab: this helps isolate the resource use.
2. Other browsers, such as Google Chrome, don’t seem to have this issue.