Black windows in Safari and Mail in Ventura OS

Same issue in macOS Ventura.

MacBook Air M1 16GB RAM, no external monitor. Apple Mail and Safari are affected.

Frustrated here as well. I'm a scientist and this flares has flared at extremely inopportune times.

2021 14" MBP, 32 Gb RAM, Ventura 13.4.1. I do sometimes use an external screen but this happens even after a fresh boot without it. Yes, many windows open in Safari, and Mail open. I don't use Maps, though (ironically) when I logged in here to comment (in Chrome for obvious reasons) the security window showing the Map of suspicious login was black. Mail sometimes seems to stop allowing me to type, but my typing is actually happening (just not displaying) as others have reported. I'm always in Dark mode.

I use two additional Macs, both Intel, a 15" MBP and a Mini, that don't experience this issue.

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...

The solid color of the blank windows can be magenta but it can also be black, gray, or white. In some cases, e.g. for Activity Monitor, Firefox, and Audacity, certain elements of the windows are drawn but others are missing.

In the case of Safari (screenshot above) the frame is drawn correctly, the tabs are drawn correctly, but the body of each tab is all black. In the case of Firefox, a wide black horizontal stripe is drawn across a white background:

In the case of Activity Monitor, the GPU history window is mostly gray but it still draws some text. The column headers of Activity Monitor's main window are missing:

Audacity draws the main window but it is missing the waveform and the tape transport buttons:

For TWS, some windows are solid gray, while others contain garbled characters:

I just found your post, as I have been experiencing the same issue ever since updated my M1 MacBook Pro to Ventura. I'll add that this behavior is intermittent for me, sometimes a window in Safari or Mail opens normally, sometimes they open black. I also get intermittent black windows in Maps. Also, sometimes the windows aren't black, but just "glitchy" with weird graphical anomalies.

All of that said, I'm curious if you found any solution? I've been trying to ignore this hoping it would resolve itself with a subsequent OS update, but the issue persists...

I also notice that when it happens in Safari, Mail, Outlook, etc, sometimes it's not only about black windows, but can also be about white windows with text not appearing when typing. (Text is there, but not visible.)

I've experienced the issue of text not appearing while typing as well! The text is there, it can be copy pasted, but you can't see it in the window. This seems to only happen after Safari starts acting up.

I'm curious what our setups have in common. I did a poor job documenting my system in my prior post, so I'll try again.

Perhaps folks could post the following for their setups?:

16" 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max - 64GB ram - Ventura 13.2.1

MANY windows and tabs open in Safari (~75 windows, hundreds of tabs)

I'm also curious if a 3rd party utility/extension might be contributing.

If you could add to your post info like this:

Possible suspects that I use are:

Al Dente (battery life management)

Avast (virus and malware scanner)

OWC Dock Ejector (for my Thunderbolt Dock)

If we all share one or more of these factors in common, perhaps that could help us narrow down the cause? if we share none of them, then it sure seems like a Ventura issue...

same problem here with black window content in Mail and Safari (also many windows and tabs open).

Sometimes re-opening the app fixes the problem, but it usually comes back quickly. A restart will fix it for a while.

Ventura 13.2.1 (also happened previously before updating OS version)

2023 16" M2 Max, 64GB RAM with 38 core GPU.

2 external LG 4k thunderbolt monitors.

I suspect this is a GPU related issue, probably affecting any apps using Webkit for rendering.

I got this issue after update to Ventura, currently I have version 13.3. It happens in Safari for some websites. It's interesting, if I switch from Safari window to another app, and Safari is in the background, then the Safari stops showing black screen and shows normal website. But if I switch back to Safari and start moving mouse then everything goes black again.

MacBook Pro M1 Max - 32GB - Ventura 13.3

Same issue. Tons of safari tabs leads to eventual black windows/garbled windows particularly if newly opened or reloaded windows. When it starts happening... mail often has a similar issue. Additionally, opening a photo in Photos tends to produce a quick flicker of the entire screen. In Safari I sometimes get strange page load error messages as well. I use Blender and that application will sometimes become unresponsive in dialog box tasks when I experience the issue with Safari. Quitting Safari usually resolves most things. Restarting definitely does for a period of time.

I believe I had these issues before upgrading to Ventura, but they definitely seem to happen a lot on this OS version. FWIW, my MacBook experienced the dreaded speaker crackles until they finally fixed it with a software update.

My best guess is that it has something to do with the memory swap. Safari just happens to be the biggest culprit with using up memory. (And possibly be the most vulnerable to memory issues.) Once my system gets to about 26-28gb of memory use, I notice that the system starts relying more on the Swap. My experience is still pretty anecdotal, but this feels like it correlates when the issues occur. I suspect the black windows and what not have to do with the OS trying to load a cache for the window in question and not being able to recover it properly/quickly. I'm not sure if this is a bug in the OS memory management or indicates a hardware (drive?) issue of some sort. I believe Safari tries to do some fancy memory juggling with its open tabs.

I'm concerned that ultimately the reason could be hardware related.

However, I've run apple's hardware diagnostic test and then the ram test and passed with flying colors. I just wiped my computer and did a reinstall with just a subset of apps I use regularly: Blender, 1Password, Google Drive, Adobe Creative Cloud. It took a day or two, but eventually I managed to get some Safari errors again.

FWIW, I have an appointment to bring my laptop in and run a few additional tests at the Apple Store this week. I'll try to report back if any issues are identified.

Michael

I just bought a new Macbook pro M2 max, 64GB and I have the same problem running Ventura 13.3.

(and i had the issue also with with a Macbok pro M1, 16 GB .

In both cases I am running one external display with lots of windows open. I switched to firefox now to avoid this messy safari behavior. Have seen the mail application problem mentioned earlier also and in numbers you would suddenly not see anymore what you type in the cells.

It is a part of a general mess working with many open windows per application .

Please note also that I still have remaining 16 GB of unused Ram memory, so there is no excuse for this behavior.

And if I would start talking about how MAC OS puts all the windows I have thoroughly distributed according subject to different desktops alltogether back into one desktop I really get frustrated. Not talk about the inability to give the desktops a name rather desktop1 ..desktop where one cannot remember where one had put the different windows according some criteria.

Christian

I have the same problem on a Mac Studio (Apple M1 Max) with 64GB RAM and Ventura 13.3.1. I let the computer running all the time, after several days, the problem of black windows in Mail and Safari crops up, an other application that shows the problem was Jump Desktop. I reduced the number of open tabs in Safari, but the problem persists. A restart remedies the problem, until it returns again.

I suspect the problem to be somewhere in the graphics card area. No idea how to solve the problem, except restarting the computer.