annoying bugs with latest MacOS's (freezing Safari, crashing Text Edit), and M1 MBP (ocl track pad unresponsiveness)

This is a few issues wrapped up into one Communities post.

I have a 2021 16" MBP, M1 Max chip, and have generally been pretty happy with it. It originally came with Monterey (I think I'm remembering that correctly). It's currently updated to Sonoma as of about 2 weeks ago.

Despite my general satisfaction with its performance (so much better than Intel chips!), there are a few things that have been bugging me....

1) Safari regularly freezing when loading pages

I have been noticing this since MacOS Ventura, at least. Safari will regularly (daily) just stop working. It won't beachball or crash, but when I select a link, enter a web page address, etc, it will just sit there, the loading progress bar will begin and then stay put. I get tired of it and open Firefox, instead.

Sometimes closing/restarting Safari seems to help, other times not. I have, at various times, cleared the history, cleared the cache, etc. Problem keeps coming back, and is very frustrating because I would prefer to keep my browsing on Safari so that the history carries over to my iPhone.

I know it's not an issue with my bandwidth because when I load the same page in Firefox or Chrome, it's instant. I've also checked Ookla's Speed Test, and no speed issues.

I had hoped this would be fixed with Sonoma, but it definitely is not.

2) Text Edit beachballing / crashing

This trick seems all new with Sonoma. Just as the title suggest, sometimes when I open Text Edit, the app beachballs and I have to force quit it. This sometimes happens several times in a row, as it did this morning. I was opening the app, as opposed to it already being open and me trying to open another document. And, this isn't an issue of trying to open some massive document (again, opening the app from scratch to a blank page).

3) Track Pad unresponsiveness

When the machine was new, I had occasional issues with the trackpad seeming unresponsive. In part, I think this may have been because I wasn't used to such a large trackpad (my last MBP, a 2013 model, had a much smaller pad), and my palm was touching it near the bottom while I was trying to do finger gestures, so the thing was confused by multiple contact inputs. This seemed to get better with time, so I chalked it up to my own ergonomic learning curve.

I seem to be noticing it again, since the Sonoma installation.

Before I upgraded to Sonoma, I had used Bitdefender for a time, based on some of the wonky Safari behavior and some things I read saying that Macs are now moving more into the crosshairs of malware. It didn't discover anything after months and after a time I felt it was just using system resources without contributing anything, so before the OS upgrade, I removed it, completely (like, I used Find Any File and removed any and every file with appropriate naming and install date).

Outside of native Apple OS software, I use pretty normal things.....carbon copy cloner, 1password, bartender, Backblaze, dropbox. I did get Malwarebytes today because it's been well reputed in the Mac community from what I can see, and I can run it when I want it - I can prevent it from being a resource sucking background process, unlike most resident malware finders (eg, Bitdefender). It came up with a negative scan.

I have EtreCheck (just got it today) installed, and can provide report if that's helpful.

Thanks for any thoughts anyone has!