Tabs Refresh Automatically in Safari 5.1?

Found these...

http://neurobashing.com/2011/08/29/safari-5-1-and-random-reload/

http://www.nadynerichmond.com/blog/2011/09/08/giving-up-on-safari/

I don't get any pop-ups, and it's not a matter of waiting for something to finish spinning... I can have a fully loaded page which spontaneously reloads.

As I reported earlier, a click on a select object which has a css border defined in a page cause Safari 5.1 to reload all tabs.

Since then, I experienced the same issue several times such a reload, but without clicking. I checked into the console, I got this message :

14/09/11 02:24:24,368 [0x0-0x359359].com.apple.Safari: Receive an invalid message from the web process with message ID 320002a

The same bug may appear twice in the same situation, but may not be reproducible any time.

Yep just to confirm... what happens is you have only 3-4 tabs open (in my case). One was playing video in the background - the others were simply text eg macrumors, amazon etc. I clicked on the video tab to watch the video and the page instantly reloaded itself. On clicking on every other tab, each one reloaded. There's no pop-up, no warning, no chance to do anything other than let it reload. Interestingly, I've had pages refresh a couple of times on loading in Safari recently too. And as said, the issue is fairly sporadic. I haven't (yet) been able to find any kind of trigger.

Thanks for the links, stefanw (and explanation Eric). I'm beginning to understand the behaviour, although not sure why it's strictly necessary for so few tabs - with very few other programmes open on my iMac either!

I just wrote a blog post that explains how to stop this annoying behavior in Safari 5.

http://stormchild.tumblr.com/post/10414883514/

Hope this helps anyone who's been frustrated by this problem. Let me know if it works for you.

Thank you for your comment and your blog post. It was an interesting read. So, I suppose, the problem is not that Safari for Mac adopted the iOS behavior of unloading tabs to free memory as some people assumed, it's "just" the web engine chrashing which is in concordance to Eric's observations that certain web elements can trigger this.

I had this very same issue and found a fix by reading an article on OSXDaily.com

http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/20/stop-safari-auto-refreshing-web-pages-in-mac-os-x -lion/

Terminal fixes the problem by showing the "Debug" menu in Safari.

1. Quit Safari
2. Open Terminal "~\Applications\Utilities" or Launchpad under "Utilities" (Launchpad only available on OS X Lion)
3. defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
4. To remove the debug menu and revert to normal settings, replace "1" with 0

I hope the Terminal command and article from OSXDaily fixes your problem with automatic refreshed tabs. I tried the command, it fixed the problem, and Safari no longer refreshes the pages.

I've also run into the dreaded spinning beach ball in more than one occasion when using Safari 5.1, especially on Mac OS X v10.7.1 Lion.

I think the issue may be what's been showing up in Activity Monitor lately under Safari as Safari Web Content, which takes up more memory and CPU resources than Safari.

The screen grab above may shed some light on the issue you've been having with Safari 5.1

• Safari Web Content used 457.6 MB memory, 8.7% CPU, and 8 threads
• Flash Player (Safari Internet plug-in) used 267.9 MB memory, 40.1% CPU, and 46 threads
• Safari used 178.4 MB memory, 5.1% CPU, and 11 threads

If you look closely, that article mentions the tip came from my blog post (the same one I linked to earlier in this thread). It's just a rephrasing of the same information I posted (though they got some of the explanation wrong; Safari is not purposely "auto refreshing" tabs; this issue occurs when the web process *crashes*).

Thanks Jason. I didn't get round to saying thanks for your time and post, but much appreciated 🙂

Very disturbing issue indeed - what if I need my extentions? Any fixes in the near future Apple?

I may have some good news, if this works for anyone else ... I was principally concerned with keeping AdBlock and ClickTo Flash.

All I did was replace ClickToFlash with ClickToPlugin.

(I have only 3 other Extensions enabled - including AdBlock)

Seems to work so far! thanks for the tips. (I'm no longer getting "auto-reload" nor "reload when you click the Tab")

Edit: somehow I missed Studebakers post above with the Terminal, etc. - I'll try that next (if necessary), thanks for the link.

Message was edited by: Soul Serenade

Same bug here --- will try this and turning off Java and report back.

The last update to Safari (5.1.2) fixed this issue entirely for me. Since updating, I have not seen it once across three machines.

Didn't work for me. The trick with the Debug menu item didn't work either - the menu item didn't actually appear.

Same here, and the updates haven't fixed anything worth squat, either.

After losing a message I'd spent 20 minutes typing in when my five open windows all went white and then refreshed, I cursed loudly, threw something soft at the floor, and then switched my bookmarks and preferences to Chrome.