Web pages crash all the time in Safari on iPhone

Not just a problem with Safari. As others have noted, all WebKit browsers have this problem.

On Safari, I read articles from The Guardian. Any sufficiently long article (e.g. restaurant review with comments) is guaranteed to crash multiple times, and then to reload at the top of the article, forcing me to re-open the comments each time, and scroll down to where I was marooned.

I have been reading The Atlantic on the Google browser (no tabs, single document only) until recently, had to bail when a single (rather long) article crashed every 15s or so. (At least that reloaded near where I left off.)

Switching from Google to Firefox a couple days ago did not help, not as crashy as the original long article, but crashes continue.

Gotta Point the finger of blame squarely at WebKit.

Don’t listen to puppybull-toot. The issue has been persistent for years now, and Apple can’t figure it out. If it’s a website bug as she/he indicated, then cnn, ESPN, my bank and about 73% of the websites I visit all have the same “bug.” If that were true, i believe it would actually be critical for Apple to address the issue within safari rather than expect such a large % of websites visited by Apple users attempt to remedy the issue on their end. That expectation would be akin to the proposal of “solving mental health” to reduce mass shootings as opposed to limiting access to firearms… well… it may be time for us all to bail on apple phones.

This really tells me it's a software issue on Apple's part then because I see it on nearly every single web page I go to. It's been going on for about 9 months and is beyond frustrating. I’m to the point of downloading a new browser on my iPhone and not using Safari anymore.

Dogcow-Moof Said:

"It's a misbehaving web page. Safari detects when the page is working improperly and notifies you rather than crash. I use a lot of different web sites and only see this issue very, very rarely."

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Use Another Web Browser:

So, what are these Web pages to speak of? Note that not all sites are too fond of Safari. Schools and Banks typically have this issue.

It could be that this is happening regularly and people don't care, but when it comes to Apple those of us who have been helping users here for many, many years know that just doesn't happen.

As I've also said before, if you feel it is something not operating properly, either make an appointment to have your phone examined:

Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

or work with Apple Support directly:

Contact - Official Apple Support

I personally spend hours per day using Safari on my iPhone and have never seen it crash on my iPad or iPhone.

In my case, re: my crashes on iPhone browser (both Safari and Chrome), (and yes, it still happens), it may have something to do that I cannot update to IOS 17, because my phone is no longer supported. I’m on IPhone 8.

I just saw I can update to a new IOS 16, maybe that will help.

It is definitely not on every page, only those with lots of ads going on, pages that are heavy to process, and are messy. It’s a little better with Chrome.

Need to figure out getting a new phone, I guess.

It's impossible to say what the issue is, most likely that your game does not conform with one or more modern web standards.

You may wish to create an account at Apple's Developer site and ask there:

Apple Developer

You talk about “so many web applications” crashing when I haven't noticed any.

Regardless, feel free to leave your feedback here:

Feedback - iPhone - Apple

Apple does read and often acts upon feedback left there.

As a developer you can also log issues following the procedure here:

Bug Reporting - Apple Developer

Still haven’t seen it happen, but feel free to let Apple know:

Feedback - iPhone - Apple

Make sure you update to iOS 18.1.

I've not seen Safari crash at all on iOS 18, and the main use of my iPhone and iPad are for web browsing via Safari.

If you are experiencing any difficulty with third-party apps or a specific website then please contact the app developer or site publisher/host directly. Here is how

• To contact an App developer --> How to contact an app developer - Apple Support
• To contact a web publisher —> Scroll Down to the bottom of the web page. You will find: Contact Us, Help Center, Support, Terms of use etc.

This is interesting. How could one possibly know that “tens of millions of people use Safari on their iPhones daily without any crashing issues whatsoever?” I would argue that a small number of people stumbling into this discussion forum and taking the time to type out this complaint in detail likely conveys a widespread issue. The lack of vocal or written complaint from the majority of users would not be evidence of proper functioning in any scenario, but complaints of crashing from a few hundred users would certainly be evidence of a potential trend at the least. Imagine if NHTSA applied your logic to recalls for safety concerns on vehicles. “So what that 45 people driving this type of car have been in accidents where their airbags didn’t deploy? We haven’t heard anything about an issue from the other 15,000 vehicle owners. It’s clearly operator error…”

A couple of debugging steps:

* It seems Javascript related. Turning off Javascript allows me access to the page(s), they just don't work (because they need Javascript).

* I created a New User on my computer -- NOT an admin -- and I can browse to at least some of the pages as "them" (even if I login to the page as "me"), but still crashes on my main/admin account.

* The pages that crash (one example: after login -- but there are dozens, this is NOT a wave apps problem!), they crash Safari, Chrome, Firefox and DuckDuckGo browsers.

...So maybe the bug is in WebKit?

I don't know enough to offer a strong opinion about where the problem is, I'm just reporting my experience.

[Edited by Moderator]

This is the issue I've been having exactly since updating to Sonoma 14.5 (MacOS). Pretty-much any site that has Javascript crashes. Turning off JS "fixes" but then the sites don't work.

I tried clearing caches, all web data, history, etc. No joy. Tried reinstalling MacOS. No fix.

Oddly, I created a new user (me-2) and things work over there. But that's sort of a stupid hack!

I'm hoping to figure out what I need to delete on main user ("me") to get that working again.

NOTE: main-user crashes on Apple sites. Pretty-much any JS site. I don't think the issue is the site(s).

Thank you for your insightful, deep replies. And forgive me for trying to bring my two cents of wisdom to others having the same problem. My mistake. And yes, we're all wrong. We don't deserve to be here. We're nothing.