Black windows in Safari and Mail in Ventura OS

Recently I have been seeing the contents of my Safari tabs and Mail windows turn black (and unreadable). I have a lot of windows open in each of the applications. Windows that were previously opened seem ok, but new ones turn black quickly, or open that way. The little window previews on Safari tabs show what the windows are supposed to look like, but nonetheless the contents of the actual tabs are black. Similarly, email messages that were already open are ok, but new ones I open are entirely black. I've only had this problem since updating to Ventura (MacOS 13.1) a month or so ago. I'm using a MacBook Pro with an Apple M1 Pro chip and 32 GB of memory.


I don't have this problem when I use the Chrome browser, but I also don't have nearly as many windows and tabs open in that.

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 13.1

Posted on Jan 23, 2023 12:37 PM

Reply

Similar questions

90 replies

Aug 28, 2023 8:40 AM in response to orindad

I spoke too soon. It's almost as if my laptop is toying with me. Shortly after my prior post in which I mentioned an improvement in my "black window bug" experience, the issue cropped up at a scale that required me to reboot, and I've rebooted at least a dozen times in the days since. It seems that for me, the issue may not actually be improved after all.

Aug 30, 2023 4:27 PM in response to Caleco

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.




Sep 5, 2023 12:22 PM in response to Caleco

same exact here as others have described and for A LONG TIME NOW! it amazes me that I have $24k+ worth of Apple products sitting on my desk (MPB 14" M1 Max 64GB 8TB + 3x XDR Pro displays) and I can't hardly browse via Safari or read mail via the Mail.app --> seriously? the two most basic things? web and email unusable? come on Apple - Steve has to be turning in his grave reading this... sad. for the first time in my life (my first apple was Apple ][e back in the 80s!), Im considering moving to Windows - my GF's PC runs circles around this MPB, for half the cost and no issues such as this. come on Apple, get with the program! its basic WEB and EMAIL !!! make it work... so frustrated, I want to throw this thing out the window.

Sep 5, 2023 12:35 PM in response to bredelet

I have not tried force quitting / relaunching finder, but the point is that this has been an issue for so many for so long we should not have to resort to some crude measures such as force quitting the apps - its akin to pulling the plug from the wall and restarting the instrument to make it work... anyway, thank you for the suggestions, I will try, but if Apple can not get their basics in order, and soon, I will be jumping ship Windows after a being a lifelong Apple supporter... wow, just wow!

Sep 14, 2023 1:31 PM in response to Caleco

Same here. Started happening quite immediately on a brand new MacBook Pro 16", M2 Pro, 32GB of ram. Just like many others I use Mail + have many tabs open (about 70 in 10 windows) and the issue crops up when more tabs are open and seems to be less when I close more tabs. But what I have open now is nowhere near what I usually have open on my 2017 iMac... Some other things:


-I don't have any of the suggested apps installed (Al Dente, OWC Dock Ejector, Avast, AppTamer,...)

-Simultaneously when Safari issues crop up, I also have issue with Pixelmator, I don't see this mentioned anywhere but I see Pixelmator in the screenshot a few posts above. When I paste a screenshot, the window is pink, just like the other poster.

-When I was having the issues, I also noticed an issue where Chrome would throw errors when loading WebGL content, mentioning my graphics card did not support it. At other times it would load fine.



Hope this gets resolved soon although I must say that I didn't see issues past week...

Sep 28, 2023 1:17 PM in response to Caleco

First of all I am very happy to have found this thread & thanks for all the good comments and ideas. I finally feel that I am not alone!


Installed Ventura only a couple of weeks ago on MacBook Pro 16", M1 Pro, 64GB, did the latest update three days ago. I am having the issue of black windows since Ventura and rebooted probably more often during the last three weeks than the 1,5 years before!

I have not installed any of the apps you had issues with (start of this thread) – BUT! I have massive issues with Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator! I get a GPU warning and sometimes cannot use the RAW filter or alike, getting a gray screen there! The bug is not replicable – sometimes it helps closing Mail, sometimes it doesn't but closing Acrobat helps, some reboots help for 5 minutes, some others for 3 hours … I updated EVERYTHING! Also the small apps like Todoist, Toggl, reinstalled Adobe Cloud, deactivated Microsofts Auto Update, deactivated Adobes auto updates, eliminated Postscript fonts, emptied font caches, PRAM reset, hardware check … tried to find the needle in the haystack!


I now switched to Google Chrome which seems to help for now but still encountering the Adobe issues – right now it helped to close Mail to use the adaptive wide angle filter and camera raw in Photoshop.


Does anyone else also have issues with the Adobe products?



Actually I am quite disappointed – I am using Macs since 30 years, producing tons of graphics, printing data etc. every day and this stuff worked for years. I usually update the system only if I have to (for good reasons), now my new data server required it. So I am sitting here, can't work properly for weeks and finding out that Apple did not fix this issue in – what? How many updates of Ventura?


But now we have Sonoma?! No, thanks!

Oct 4, 2023 4:43 PM in response to KleopetraOnMac

Yes, this also affects Adobe products and sometimes other third party applications. Freeing up memory (closing other applications) or rebooting are the only know temporary fixes. Apple must be aware of this unbelievably substantial issue in Ventura. It's no exaggeration that aside from previous Intel based Mac issues and former very annoying external display issues (forgetting display resolutions and mixing up displays in a multi-display setup last year) this is the absolute biggest annoyance ever experienced. It of course goes beyond the level of annoyance since it barely let us focus on professional work here for most part of the year and costs money every day. This must be a substantial memory handling architecture issue with Apple Silicon and a software layer update introduced with Ventura.


Has anyone with these issues tried macOS Sonoma or talked to Apple support? Apple renders all new Apple Silicon Macs almost useless in a professional environment. This problem should probably be either brought to the attention of a media outlet and/or law office.

Black windows in Safari and Mail in Ventura OS

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple ID.