This aspect of Safari 5.1 is really lame!

Hi Scott - I get exactly the same reponse...always with yahoo; which causes the ball of death and then the response....Webpages are not responding. To visit the selected webpage, all webpages in other tabs and windows must be force reloaded. Do you want to visit this page?

Please could someone tell us how we get around this or how to reinstall safari 5?

There's also a problem using security patches/websites trusteer and rapport as they're not yet compatible with safari 5.1!

Thanks 🙂

I would like a solution to this as well. I'll keep watching here.

I agree that it is a lame aspect of the new Safari. Partially lame for the presentation. And partially lame for the effect if one clicks on "Visit Page".

I have mostly (or always) have clicked Cancel, waited a few seconds, and then the page I'm trying to load eventually loads. I typically have 60+ tabs open, and I'm not about to force reload all of then. For those people who are just clicking on "Visit Page" I recommend clicking on Cancel instead and seeing what happens.

The error message always says that "webpages" are not responding, but I've had this problem when loading just a signal page. For it to use the plural of webpages is confusing/mis-leading.

Also, why can't it force reload just that specific tab?

This is the type of error message I'd expect to see in a Windows OS.

To understand why this comes up you need to understand how the Safari processes have been redesigned for version 5.1

Historically plugins have been a leading cause of many a Safari crash. So in Safari 4 Apple seperated Safari into 2 processes - one of Safari itself and it's renderer and the other for it's plugins to run in. This meant that if the plugin crashed it Safari would in theory continue to function.

This of course ignored the other ways in which a web page can crash a browser so in Safari 5.1 Apple separated things even further. Now Safari is separated into 3 processes - The Safari app comprimising of the windows , menus , tabs , bookmarks and URLs of what's loaded in each tab/window , our old friend from above WebkitPluginAgent and a new process just for the web page renderer. This new process is called "Safari Web Content"

What your seeing here is when the Safari Web Content process crashes on the content of a page for any reason.

Safari can detect when this happens and automatically restarts the process. When you click back into a window or tab where you had web page stuff loaded before it gets reloaded.

As for fixing it ?

You'll need to look at what plugins & extensions you have loaded. IMHO the easiest thing to do would be to active the Guest account via Users & Groups and switch to that. Then open Safari and see if it crashes.

Also look in

Library -> InputManagers

Library -> InputMethods

Library -> Scripting Additions

Library -> Safari

Both in your user folder and at the root of your hard drive.

Also check your Extensions preferences in Safari. ClickToFlash and ClickToPlugin are the big crashers for me right now. I turn them off and SWC doesn't crash on loading youtube video.

Interesting. I am not seeing this popup. However, on occassion, I noticed that all of my open safari windows reload at once. This happens when I am interacting with one window. I notice it happening about once a day or so and cannot figure out a pattern (yet).

Might this be related? Is there a case where safari detects a crash and restarts w/o the popup?

Using ps (and greping by process number), I see that the "Safari Web Content" process is much younger than Safari (and the timing is about right for the reload). Now what?

Hi! FYI, I am having the same problem being forced to force-reload.

I also have possible related problems: the program reloads a page sometimes without my seeming to cause it, and also, today, on launching the computer and then Safari, it loaded up "all windows and tabs from last session" as I asked, but a number of the pages are blank -- the title of the page is in the tab, but there is no URL showing above and no content (so no reload is possible).

I will look at the other solutions mentioned here...but I wanted you to show you are not nearly alone. For me, however, the forced-reload issue is happening quite often -- numerous times a day.

OK, once a day was an underestimate. Now that I am paying more attention, it is mutlple times a day.

Yeah, that happens. :-)

Does anyone know how to fix it? Should I go to previous safari version & how? Please provide some steps as this is frustrating! Thanks

As for fixining... it seems there is no solutioning but just ideas where to look but what should be done to fix this? Am I missing it? Thanks

Well first off you need to find it if it is due to Safari Web Content is crashing. The symptoms sure sound like it to me but some confirmation is always good.

You can do this by monitoring the Safari Web Content process using Activity Monitor. AM you open from Applications -> Utilities , set it to All processes at the top right and filter on Safari by putting in Safari in the text box to the right of that.

If it's crashing you should see it disappear completely then reappear and your web pages spontenously reload.

That means there's something causing SWC to quit. Now you just need to find out what's crashing it.

Process of elimination I've made some suggestions about where to start here :

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3198617?answerId=15802084022#15802084022

Just want to chime in I am having the same problem. Is anyone else seeing this using the PDF shubert plugin? I'm stuck with that since I use it for Mozilla, and from what I've seen there's no way to tell shubert to work just with firefox and leave safari as is with it's own PDF support. GRRRRRRR

Right, I started seeing this too and it's so annoying.

Someone explains here why this message comes up, but didn't really explain why the message comes up... Ok, so there are 3 processes. Wasn't that supposed to make Safari BETTER ??

And anyway if the renderer or whatever crashes that should just mean Safari needs to restart the renderer and render the pages again... NOT download them again. In fact it should have the page title and complete content cached somewhere so that when it crashes it can crash almost seamlessly. Don't even show a message, just render the page again. Even better, just restart the plugins. Shouldn't need to render the page again for that, because the plugins rarely affect the layout right? Like flash is always in the same rectangle, quicktime movies are always in the same rectangle. If they crash it shouldn't affect the way the rest of the page looks!

sacmac898 wrote:

Right, I started seeing this too and it's so annoying.

Someone explains here why this message comes up, but didn't really explain why the message comes up... Ok, so there are 3 processes. Wasn't that supposed to make Safari BETTER ??

You just used a double negative there. I explained why the message come up but I didn't really explain it ?. I'm confused here yes I did explain it at a level of detail I thought would be accessible to people.

Yes it's supposed to make things better but Apple can't guarantee the legtimancy of plugins that technically inject themselves into Safari's code base. They can't even guarantee to it for Extensions written using the Safari Extensions SDK as at the end of the day's it's still third party code.

We don't have ESP here so we don't know what's installed on your computer in order to track down what's making it crash. I know that during my normal browsing I don't have this issue so it must be something at your end. You need to check the folders I've given in detail for what's crashing it. Many people have been known to install all sorts of things and forgetting they've installed them.