Safari problems since Sonoma upgrade

Safari is unusable after waking since the Sonoma upgrade. As soon as I click on the browser the Beachball appears, mostly not spinning. This persists for a while then the normal Cursor appears. So I click again and the beachball appears again. Sometimes it settles down and sometimes I have to right click the Dock icon, which reads "Application not responding" and I have to Force Quit.

Context as follows: 2 tabs on YouTube open when the machine's lid is closed. It's returning these YouTube tabs to their proper state that seems to cause the issues. This has not happened on any previous version of macOS.

MBPro M1

Safari has 1Blocker and Adblock installed - this also hasn't been a problem before.

Posted on Sep 29, 2023 12:48 AM

Best reply

cyreniac

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Nov 20, 2023 8:18 AM

On this subject of LA Court Connect - I was helping my attorney father install this terrible software on his MacBook Air M2 running 14.1 (now 14.1.1).

1) The pkg installer ultimately just halts with a black screen.

2) It causes cascading problems in macOS including making browsing in Safari unusable, constant beach ball freezes, and removing sound capability completely from the OS.

3) Uninstalling the app does not remedy the problems - as it leaves behind a buggy driver.

4) The email he received from LA County had no warning about any incompatibility with macOS Sonoma.

I was about to reinstall the entire OS - but decided to do some sleuthing on this software.

After analyzing the innards of the pkg - I realized the devs are wrapping the use of an open source audio loopback driver called blackhole.

If you remove the software's added audio driver, everything returns to normal.

To do this, do the following:

Open Terminal
cd /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL
sudo rm -rf UDC_Virtual2ch.driver
Restart macOS

It's an absolute travesty that this software is still available for download, that there is no check against the OS for compatibility, there are no remediation instructions, and clearly was not even smoke tested against Sonoma.

Also the fact that it can even cause this kind of destruction classifies it in my eyes as malware.

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