Black windows in Safari and Mail in Ventura OS

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!

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.

We ran Apple Diagnostics, booted in Safe Mode, and also ran Disk Utilities tests in Recovery Mode. No hardware issues were detected and this has not been solved. Did anyone talk to Apple Support or bring the Mac(s) to a Genius Bar?

FWIW, I've been using the same hardware since November of 2021 (M1 Max MBP), and I never experienced this issue in Monterey. For me it started happening immediately after installing Ventura. Correlation doesn't necessitate causation of course, but I doubt this was simply "coincidence".

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.

It’s probably not very helpful but after suffering from this bug for about 1-2 weeks after getting a brand new M2 MBP 2 months ago I haven’t had it again. I did not change anything in my daily habits. Still using Safari with many tabs open and Mail.

The only remote thing is that some connection issues at my internet modem were solved. Don’t think that’s related though.

Googling I found that the problem has been traced (maybe if this is true anyway) to Apple WKWebView (the following is a copy/paste from the website under this):

"As mentioned, the macOS has multiple system applications, like Safari, Notes, Mail, etc., that rely on the Apple WKWebView to render the HTML elements and support scripts.

If you’re simultaneously using these apps, WebKit is heavily utilized for rendering. And sometimes, it fails to render the pages, resulting in blank screens or distorted layouts."

https://browserhow.com/how-to-fix-the-black-screen-window-in-safari-browser/

Sounds like, presuming this is true, that the problem is at Apple's end and based on how long this has been going on either they haven't figure out how to easily fix it or don't care.

I certainly am sick of the issue.

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.

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?

One person reported that it stopped after upgrading to Sonoma.

But others said it disappeared without doing anything. That’s what happened to me.

Do you use Apple Mail? Try quitting the app whenever you can.

Although I am not the person you responded to I don't use apple mail and have this issue. I am planning to try the upgrade in system software when I have time to deal with it this weekend (need to back up first as I haven't done that in a week).

Hi, joining in.

Have had this problem ever since I've got M2 Max 14" MacBook Pro this February. The described problem (webpages in Safari covered in black partly or entirely, sometimes flickering when scrolling, sometimes not) have been with me all the way, and didn't go away when I've installed Sonoma (currently at 14.0, will update 14.1.1 later but so far I doubt it'll help).

Can't say it's a dealbreaker for me since I use Chrome concurrently, but definitely not pleasant since I've to reboot the browser and close all of the opened pages to get rid of it.

I have exactly the same computer and exactly the same problem. Ironically I couldn't get the page to reply to your post to load on Safari and had to switch to Firefox.

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

Like you I have found rebooting temporarily solves the issue. This sure sucks though due to all the bookmarks I have in Safari. Sigh.

I wish Apple would deal with 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?