Tabs Refresh Automatically in Safari 5.1?

I was give up on it until Apple fix it.

I just lost an hour of work. I just switched to Chrome for good. Apple nees a technical ombusman. Steve Job is missing a ton of major UX mistakes. HELLO STEVE PAY ATTENTION>

Wow, this is terrible! I always have stuff open in seperate tabs and I'm now constantly losing it.

I've never had to before but I'll probably have to switch browsers until this gets fixed, if it ever does!

Same here, everything is up to date - Safari 5.1, and OS X 10.6.8

It's horrible dealing with time wasted while needlessly refreshing pages when I tab away and then back again 😠. Thankfully, I have yet to lose work when switching tabs - but mostly because I'm being cautious of doing that.

I've tweeted about this issue twice so far and linked back to this discussion. Feel free to do the same, and perhaps use the hashtag #SafariTabBug if you think it would be useful to do so.

Tweets: http://twitter.com/jydesign/status/99152552272211969 and http://twitter.com/jydesign/status/101736464735412224

This and numerous other incredibly frustrating bugs have driven me nuts since the new 5.1 "update", and Apple's been playing games with this, as well. I called after a couple days, was able to speak to a higher-level tech person, and he assured me they were well aware of the mess, and promised a fix "ASAP". Well, 10 days later and no fix, so I called again, & spoke to a different higher-level tech guy. He tried to tell me the first guy wasn't correct, that nothing was wrong with Safari, and I simply need to disable/remove all my add-ons & extensions.

Well, that's a royal pain, doing that, then loading one at a time, opening & closing & checking Safari each & every time, and asked him if he knew WHICH ONES were causing the most problems, as it would be quite easy for them to check them out, & then inform us, their customers, which ones to delete (at least the most popular ones)....

He also said he's received no calls about people having problems, so either no one posting to this board, or anyone else experiencing problems have bothered to call or send Apple feedback, or he's just lying to me. I wish Apple would realize there's bugs in Safari, and just fix it already! Being distracted & lied to is no way to build customer loyalty, and is a betrayal of all of us who've been Mac-users for many years....

Yup, had it for the first time now. I also noticed the cause: WebKit.

WebKit restarted right before all tabs required refreshing. I guess it crashed.

May be a bug ... not a Safari one.

Add-ons AdBlock and/or ClickToFlash were causing the issue for me. Just removed them and everything is spiffing.

Well, ClickToFlash was about the only add-on I kept installed, since I like it so much. After reading your commentI , I uninstalled it to see if it would make a difference. Well, Safari is still acting as buggy as when I first updated it, so it's not ClickToFlash...

It did the trick for me, when a background tab gets the focus, a tab that has been sitting idle for quite a while and went through a number of sleep & wake up cycles, it does not get reloaded, I get a blank page for a few millisecs but that is it (I don't recall that behaviour though).

Just after add-ons being uninstalled background tabs were refreshed one last time and never since.

The other factor : I don't have Java enabled ... since PointsBeyond mentioned it that may be another reason.

So I shall rephrase : "May be a bug ... may be not a Safari one", the merge of iOS & OS X and of parts of the applicative layer may bring us some more issues like this one.

I still believe it's due to RAM and tabs being unloaded. Open Safari with like 20 tabs with different websites, then open a lot of programs and files. Try going from one tab in Safari to another. You'll see it will refresh because it got unloaded from RAM.

Does ClickToFlash need to be removed, or just dis-abled? I have it installed and dis-abled and see these sorts of problems. BTW, seems that no everyone agress that it is caused by ClickToFlash (and since mine is dis-abled, I am doubtful).

BTW, in my case, this mostly happens when I kill one Safari window (the one that comes into focus redraws). Wonder if there could be a bug in some of the clean-up code. Apple engineers, have a look.

-John

Truth is, ClicktoFlash is no longer compatible with Safari 5.1, which the website informed me I am using ClicktoPlugin instead, as recommended, and it did help things, but certainly didn't clear up all the issues. If all these problems were solely due to certain plugins or extensions, I would think Apple could figure out which ones pretty quickly & just release a list of known incompatible add-ons. That they haven't, and that users haven't found any one specific cause for their woes, implies to me that it is an Apple bug. I've had RAM usage issues with previous versions, but never had all this crazy behavior, like the constantly refreshing tabs (which happens when I do anything, could be closing a toolbar window, not even a tab or browser window, mouse oddities, spinning wheels, freezes, etc....

Is this problem happening to anyone running Lion?

I'm running Snow Leopard and getting all of the problems and odd behaviour.

Surely if this was occuring in Lion, people all over the place would be going crazy about this?

Add me to the list of people really annoyed about the auto-refreshing of my Safari pages. I am TIRED of losing information!

I can confirm I'm using Lion (upgraded from Snow Leopard) and I am having the same issue.