Black windows in Safari and Mail in Ventura OS

I am experiencing a similar problem on M2 Max and M2 Ultra Mac Studio computers, both with 64GB. This "blank window bug" affects not only Safari but many applications including TextEdit, Activity Monitor, Firefox, Audacity, and Trader Workstation (TWS). It only happens under heavy GPU load. I can resolve it be quitting enough applications to sufficiently reduce the demand for GPU processing. When this problem is happening, GPU utilization is close to 100%.

I have had the same problem for months with my M2 MacBook Air. I see it at work and home when connected to an external monitor. It does not seem to happen when only using the built-in display.

It only seems to affect web-like content rendering, like in Safari and Mail, so I think it is a Safari WebKit + graphics related software issue. The actual web page seems to be still rendered and working behind the black mask, because the scrollbar works when scrolling, and sometimes selecting content or drag/drop makes it appear.

One workaround I've found is changing the external display refresh rate (e.g. from 60 Hz to 75 Hz) which seems to force a complete reset of the relevant graphics subsystem and pages will then appear again temporarily. But it will then break again after this.

Chrome is also unaffected, so that's another workaround for web browsing. But I miss my iCloud Keychain passwords there.

I've disabled all Safari extensions and that doesn't help. I've also tried different USB-C connections and HDMI adapters, and I get the same situation sporadically with all of them. I tried looking in Console for Safari- and display-related errors, but didn't see anything relevant.

Hopefully Apple gets to the bottom of the problem and fixes it in an OS update because it is very annoying, and there is no good workaround. I imagine it is affecting a lot of people at Apple too.

I have had the same problem (MacBook Pro 16, 2021, M1pro, 32gb) with the black windows. I just had an elaborate chat with a senior Apple Support employee who knew the problem.

She advised me to start in safe mode (startup with on/off button pushed) and then when you have the option to start with MacintoshHD click with L-shift pushed) and then after logging in, restart in normal mode. Apparently some changes occur then.

Until now (1 hour later) I still have no problems.

Will keep you informed it that changes for the worse.

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

I don't need to reboot. I suffices to relaunch the Finder: Apple menu > Force Quit > Finder > Relaunch.

But even under Ventura 13.5.1, the bug is still present, though it seems to have evolved a bit. Moreover, it also crops up in various Microsoft Office apps (Outlook, Excel).

At the risk of Jinxing it again...

I'm one of the early posters on this thread, and I was experiencing this mostly on a daily basis on Ventura (I did have a couple of inexplicable respites which would last for a few days or weeks).

I have not experienced this issue since updating to Sonoma, which I installed ~1 month ago. Not a glitch since. I haven't changed any behavior, I haven't closed any Safari tabs (if anything I've opened more now that the issue seems to be gone).

I'm hopeful that Sonoma has finally put an end to this for me.

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.

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

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.

Hi Alamode,

Have you already upgraded to 13.4.1.? That seemed to have solved the problem for me and for the last week, I am running Safari and Mail together, and no 'black windows' so far. Would be curious if others experience the same. Thanks.

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.

I am running Sonoma and getting a similar problem. When I open new windows in a 3rd party TWS application, they come up empty (all gray) under certain conditions. This only happens when Safari is running. I have a small handful of Safari windows open e.g. 1-3 but my main Safari window has zillion tabs open in it. Closing Safari solves the problem without needing to restart the three instances of TWS. When I am in state, all new TWS windows open blank. Opening a firefox window also comes up very weird and unusable (all white with a wide black stripe across the top). Closing Safari solves all the problems without the need to restart TWS.

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)

Same problem here. I am using a MBP M1 Max with 64 GB of memory with Ventura 13.4. I have none of the suspects installed. What helps for me is to close Apple Mail and once Mail is closed the black windows in Safari magically disappear... I therefore suspect it is a problem with Apple Mail which has become a very buggy program overall...

Another (temporary) solution that I found is as follows. For me, it happens mostly in Apple Mail, either when reading mail (in that case, I see a black content pane) or when writing mail (in that case, I see a white content pane). Whenever this happens, you can double click in the content pane, and with luck you will select some content, or you can try to hit Command-A to select all content. To my big surprise, all content is then visible again, though it still looks somewhat weird. After scrolling around a bit, everything jumps back to normal. No need to restart/relaunch anything.

Can anyone confirm that this also works for them?