Black windows in Safari and Mail in Ventura OS

Same but different. I do get the black windows, so kind of GPU mishap, likely not handling the fragments each window so some times I'd see only part of the window MIA. However I have a similar bug which turns my windows magenta. This rarely happens unless I have AppleTV+.

The instance of this image in Photos crashes the app. I had to eventually just t take a snapshot with the phone.

So, the Mac will have a backing store as a series of small fragments on a visibility chain for each window that will naturally render it faster than just entire windows. I suspect that something is sending it looking towards other and wrong memory. There may be a test color used to pick out these things, as I use magenta for highlighting something that's not supposed to be right. But then how does ti corrupt an actual image itself, unless its maintaining the same memory map internally, but at some point of the bad pointers will cause a crash.

And I have Photos hanging instead of crashing one trying to display another one. The only way to get out of this is to reboot. Simply killing it and relaunching fails as it is automatically launching with that image.

This frequently is accompaied with a lot of bad video stuff, Windows flickering and the such. I was able to get a video to Apple about this but have heard nothing from them.

I had a two calls with Apple support. I took the following actions: (1) I gave them a detailed report of the issues I have been encountering and also passed to them the link of this discussion thread; (2) I demonstrated them (via screen sharing) the issues at real-time. From their side, they asked me to run diagnostics to check the h/w and then suggested to install Sonora. If that doesn't fix the problems, then I will have a follow-up call. I am currently waiting for the opportunity to install the new OS.

Still happening on Sonoma 14.5 (23F79). Have confirmed that closing high memory usage programs gets rid of the problem until a lot of memory is used again

So glad to find this thread. Same issues for me, M1 Max 16" also seems to have gotten worse over time. Used to only happen with large numbers of windows open (100+). Now happens with even 10 windows. One of the last comments mentioned quitting mail and seeing the issues resolve. I did the same, and sure enough, the Safari black windows went away after quitting mail, and bringing any black windows into the foreground. Will need to see if it returns without mail running, but it makes me suspect that there is a bug with Apple Mail WKWebView implementations that somehow breaks web view rendering throughout the OS. I will monitor and report back.

I will say this is an insane bug for a $4k+ laptop to exhibit with 64 gigs of shared memory. Has been a source of great frustration.

I described the massive problems I had about two weeks ago here … I did not change ANYTHING but simply stopped using Safari. This was the key here – EVERYTHING really works fine, no reboots, no problems, no black or pink windows anymore! All my apps including Mail work perfectly fine, no issues at all since abandoning Safari!!! (Using Chrome now) Did not reboot my MacBook since two weeks+! I am more than happy to have found my needle in the haystack!

(Mac Book Pro, M1, Ventura 13.6)

I don't think I saw that again since some time after the 13.5 release. I guess it resolved itself slowly or it is taking a long time to come back.

Strangely, I use another Mac with Ventura too and the other Mac never had the issue.

I always delay upgrading to the latest OS version for specifically these kind of problems. But last week i assumed that Ventura has been out for so long now, it MUST be safe to upgrade to 13.6.7 with my 16” M1 max 64GB; and wow, was i wrong! 

Yes, I now have these Safari and Mail black and white window issues, and its infuriating to see that this thread started 18 months ago, and yet no Apple Support specialist has weighed in with a reliable work-around… and of course if you call in to Applecare, they’ll blindly suggest that you upgrade to Sonoma, which some people here are saying STILL has the issue… and maybe even more.  And/or they’ll have you reinstall the OS, fresh; but i already did a clean install when i did this upgrade; so this standard suggestion is a waste of time as well.

So….I’m wondering, has this thread carried on somewhere else? Is there indeed some kind of solution?  Any help or clues appreciated.  

 I was bug-free on Monterey since the start, but wanted to see if i’d get some better performance from Ventura, and wanted to try some newer versions of apps that required OS 13+

But no upgrade is worth this kind of frustration. 

Incidentally, been using Apple Macs for over 30 years, along with dozens of my colleagues, and we’re altogether sad to say that Apple support for Macs has been on a steady decline ever since their disastrous TouchBar model was released :(  

But i’d love to see them get back to their roots, and start to respect their loyal customers as much as their speculating shareholders

I forgot to include my hardware & software setup:

I'm running on a M1 Max with 64GB ram. Like you I have a LOT of windows open in Safari. I would estimate ~75 windows, each with multiple tabs. I could easily have 300+ tabs open. I only have a handful (literally 5 at the moment) of windows open in Mail.

For me, it definitely seems to be safari that trips things up. If I reboot the computer and don't launch Safari, everything seems to run fine. Once I launch Safari, however, glitches start appearing in Safari and certain other applications.

This all worked fine in Monterey, but clearly something has changed in Ventura.

Like you, I've also found that rebooting can improve things for a while, but not always. Sometimes the problem recurs immediately after reboot. I did try reinstalling the OS. For a few hours it seemed like this might have helped, but then the issue reappeared.

You mentioned that you rarely use maps, but I'm curious if you've noticed impacts in other applications? Once this problem is triggered (seemingly by Safari) I've seen weird graphical anomalies in everything from the Finder to Microsoft Excel. I've resorted to a 2-computer setup: doing most of my work on the MacBook Pro, while using a MacBook Air for web browsing...

Somewhat amusing (while also being massively irritating). Safari had been working for a while when I first attempted to search for solutions to this issue, but this happened:

In another thread on this same problem, someone suggested to run the maintenance tasks of Onyx. This makes sense, because a friend of mine claimed to have solved the problem by aggressively clearing caches and removing non-essential application support files. But that is a very time consuming (and error-prone) process. Onyx maintenance does something similar.

I ran Onyx maintenance tasks (for Ventura) and, so far, the problem hasn't reared its ugly head again. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Our WKWebView Based Apps having the same issue!

When user closed some huge memory/cpu usage apps, the webview works again.

Feedback id:

https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/feedback/13051107

WebKit Bug:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260694

Seeing it for the first time yesterday. All-black windows in some Safari and Mail.app windows; sometimes resizing makes the contents come back. Sometimes certain elements of the window contents reappear against a black page background.

Just launched Maps.app to check based on another post: Yep, Maps.app too.

16" 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max - 64GB ram - Ventura 13.3.1 (a)

I do have quite a few windows and tabs open in Safari, but I have certainly had many more in the past without this issue so I don't think it is directly correlated to that. My memory pressure isn't high.

I do have two of the three possible suspects on a previous poster's list:

Al Dente (battery life management)

OWC Dock Ejector (for my Thunderbolt Dock)

I'll add another: AppTamer

The system log shows some entries referencing webkit GPU from AppTamer (a third-party app that can keep troublesome processes from hogging the CPU):

debug 09:12:23.740250-0400 App Tamer found no value for key com.apple.WebKit.GPU in CFPrefsSearchListSource<0x60000004ca00> (Domain: com.stclairsoft.AppTamer, Container: (null))

I also saw some console entires from runningboardd:

debug 09:12:19.054094-0400 runningboardd > xpcservice<com.apple.WebKit.GPU([app<application.com.apple.Safari.201078.201507(501)>:1473])(501)>:1925 ['GPUProcess Foreground Assertion'] [175-1473-1919]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I agree with another poster that particularly the correlation with HTML content in Mail.app indicates a webkit-rendering related issue, although it could just be that Webkit is triggering some sort GPU bug.

I have the same problem as well with Mail, Safari and now Outlook also. Would love to find a fix!

I posted a bug report via the Feedback Assistant app, FB12217630 and referenced this thread

FWIW, I upgraded to 13.4.1 and the issue has returned for me.