Safari 5.1 'Broken' in OSX.6.8?

I have turned off Safari extensions altogether & I still can't open a new window or do much else in Safari 5.1. Had no problem at all prior to the update last week. I also read the note about this problem on the Apple Knowledge Base page which lists numerous spots to look for plugins to remove and determined that it is easier to switch to Firefox as default browser and hope that Apple comes up with a fix in the next release. This is a thouroughly un-Apple-like experience. Perhaps the problem will go away when I move to Lion after Summer term is over at my university, but I don't like to make that big a change in the middle of a semester lest something else breaks!

I called Apple about the numerous issues I was having, was handed off to a more senior advisor, and he told me Apple definitely is aware of all the problems, & promised me they are working on a fix, which would show up in the Software Update ASAP....

However, this was about FIVE DAYS ago, and I'm growing impatient. I sure hope they get this fixed soon, as it's very frustrating. 5.05 was working so well, I never should've installed the update...

Thanks Martin.

This was driving me nuts. In my case the Quartz Composer.webplugin caused the clicking problems so it is gone now. I also had a strange thing where new windows was created as hidden windows. This was resolved by removing the WebSnapper Safari button.

I have a bunch of other symptoms of a broken product for all y'all-

The worst is the constant, constant, constant need to refresh webpages- which is something it should be able to do in the background, especially when you have a number of tabs open. But when you go to a page that is tabbed, it starts reloading the page then and there.

That might be considered Cache Friendly: only loading in pages when you visit them, but it slows my morning News & Tech reading when I might be in a hurry and need the dynamic stuff loaded in the background. I don't need to see a blank screen for several seconds while the page I had open, and was reading, reloads for no apparent reason.

And in fact, writing this very post - as a brief experiment I visited another Tab mid-sentence, and when I returned to this site it had Refreshed so much I had been kicked out of the session and had to log back in. Which is extremely Forum-unfriendly behaviour.

It's almost as if Akamai and Google Ads had predicated this behaviour upon Apple to increase Click-thru's!

Not all web servers like having persistent loads on their web-pages. And so I have now had several instances of having to "Force Reload" a web-page that a few seconds ago was loaded just fine.

I have even had - believe this or not - had "Guru Meditation" reports from some sites. I have not seen this report since the early 90's when Amiga's would go down.

And another one - when you have a malformed or half-assed website address, it no longer goes to a Web-Search to look it up, it just rolls over like a dead cockroach instead - makes me feel like it's 1996 again.

I think it's time for Safari 5.0.6 because 5.1 just isn't ready to play with the Internet yet.

But I do like the 'Reading List' option.

I removed Quartz Composer.webplugin; SIMBL and other old web plug-ins plus removed Safari and all its components then reinstalled. Safari then worked well, like brand new. Thanks to all the contributors for pointing the way. Definitely 'old stuff' was the problem; not Safari or Mac OS 10.6.8.

What worked for me was to delete the following folder and the files contained:

HD/Library/Application Support/SIMBL

Thanks to blue439 for the tip 🙂

Best Wishes

Mac4RJS wrote:

I removed Quartz Composer.webplugin; SIMBL and other old web plug-ins plus removed Safari and all its components then reinstalled. Safari then worked well, like brand new. Thanks to all the contributors for pointing the way. Definitely 'old stuff' was the problem; not Safari or Mac OS 10.6.8.

Well, it may have "definitely" been the problem for your machine, but obviously this has not been the case for others. And if that's all the problem is, why didn't Apple simply wirte an update that would do just that? I'm very disappointed in this apparent lack of concern for the many serious issues users are having with this "updgrade", including an awful, steps-backward "autofill" that can hardly be called "auto", that is still in place in the current "update". I'm still using the 5.05 I re-installed after going through a month of **** with 5.1 and would very much like to upgrade, but won't until I'm sure all these bugs are ironed out.....