Black windows in Safari and Mail in Ventura OS

Hey, bros, I am returning with good news, my MacBook without that problem for more than two weeks after reinstalling IDEA and resetting the external monitor. I don't know which solved this problem, but it really looks like returned to normal even haven't reinstalled the os system. I found the problem only arises when connected to the external monitor, so it might be some point that causes this problem, and my series of operations eliminated that point. hope these clues can help you guys.

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.

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!

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.

This is not caused by or isolated to Ventura. Frustratingly, I've had this since day 1 on 2021 M1 MacBook Pro 6gb ram 2tb Hard drive. Ran Monterey many years and had this problem. Upgraded to Ventura not long a go and still have this problem. Is Apple even aware of how prevalent this issue is? There isn't much online about it. I tend to have a lot of windows and safari tabs open at once, and it seems if it gets to be too many and I open more they turn black. And outlook messages and mail messages load black as well. The only thing that helps is closing windows and apps, and rebooting apps and the computer. I don't see this issue in Chrome or Firefox, but they aren't ideal. I assumed it was ram but I've always been below 60gb, usually in 40-50 gb ram range. But that's the whole reason why I splurged on the max Ram to not have to deal with issues like this. It's really frustrating and problematic. I am not usually an early OS upgrade adopter. Does anyone know if Sonoma has addressed/solved this?

No, I’ve seen it happen when I’ve had no more than 3 tabs open with just one window. So far the only workaround I know of is to switch the vital (e.g. work-related) browsing to Chrome, using Safari for minor tasks if any.

>Do you find it matters how many tabs and windows you have open in Safari affect it?

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:

Can confirm: Not fixed in 13.4.

Another note: I do tend to keep a lot of Safari tabs and windows open, and this could be related. I was able to make it stop happening by closing all Safari windows, but that may just be correlation and not causation.

@ws_tom_v I do something sort of similar when it happens in Safari and sometimes I can get the page to re-display by selecting all and a bit of scrolling.

That said since the 13.5 upgrade things have been a lot more stable for me with Safari and it hasn't recurred though it could just be that I've not managed to trip the bug yet.

A brief update on my experience with this issue:

I posted back in March, and at that time once the "black window bug" occurred, all of the windows in the impacted application would be rendered useless, and a reboot was the only (albeit temporary) solution.

This changed for me sometime in ~July. It seemed that after a system update (I don't recall which one, I am currently running 13.5), the bug became both less pervasive, and less permanent. I still have occasional black windows, but it seems to now only impact the active window, and it sometimes just resolves itself if I wait for a few moments. Other times I can refresh the window, and it will resolve.

It has been many weeks since I had to reboot to resolve the issue. The issue still seems to impact multiple applications (Safari, Mail & Maps mainly).

This is pure speculation, but it almost feels like one of the system updates added a background routine to check for this issue, and then resolve it automatically.

I'm curious if others have noticed an improvement in their own "black window bug" experience?

I was (am) experiencing this same issue on a 13" MacBook Air. I assumed it was a memory issue, so I purchased a maxxed out 15" MacBook Air (latest model) and started experiencing the same issue. I returned the 15" Air and bought a 16" Pro top spec, with 64GB RAM, and alas, I am still experiencing the issue. I am currently submitting this in Chrome because all my new Safari windows are black and I don't want to restart (again). I really can't believe how long this has been an unfixed issue... I have a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro (64GB) and it does not have this problem. I hope this isn't a hardware issue with the M1/M2 chips...

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...

Same for me, as soon as I installed Ventura I started getting black screens in Safari and mail. Sometimes also the search terms I put in the URL will disappear, and the list of google suggestions in the menu that pops up will also be blank (the list is there, with a line and a little magnifying glass where each suggestion should be, but no visible text for any of the suggestions).

This black screen bug is a real show-stopper and apparently has driven people away from Safari to competing browsers. I've submitted a bug report, others who are experiencing the same thing should go to applefeedback:// and submit a bug report as well.

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...