This aspect of Safari 5.1 is really lame!

I've given up with it. I don't get that particular error message but i do get the strange tab behaviour where everything needs to reload. I also get beach balls on pages with long content and listings along with constant stuttering and small freezes (again with long content).

I tried uninstalling the very few plugins i actually use and the behaviour remains. Safari 5.1 is a real turd to be honest. I installed Chrome with all the same plugins and now everything is smooth, fast and working as it should.

I really like the new gestures of safari, full screen and it's integration into the machine but if it can't perform the fundamental basics of web browsing then what's the point of all that bling?

I'm really annoyed this past few years with the amount of bugs contained in Apple's propriotry software but still unleashed on the unsuspecting public before adequate testing.

It's poor and we deserve better, especially since we pay double for the privilage.

I have the same problem - with exactly the same symptoms as everyone else. I'm too busy to faff around trying to fix it myself so I'll just switch to Chrome till it's sorted...or for ever if I like it!

Blu: Black's right. The constant reloading of pages is a great hinderance to productivity.

If any of you are old enough to remember Word 6.0 and the response it got from Mac users (customers contacting Microsoft to demand a way to downgrade to 5.1), it's a lesson that needs to be retold around the Safari development group. At minimum, that should lave been a user-controllable variable.

@dr2consulting

You guys just don't seem to be getting it.

My Safari 5.1 install's webpages/tabs aren't reloading at random. I'm not getting that dialog as often as you guys are. My Safari Web Content process isn't crashing as often as you guys are.

If it was an issue with Safari I would be crashing right , left and centre.

And I'm not.

Something is causing your SWC process to crash and it's going to be something external to Safari like an extension , addon , SIMBL plugin , scripting addition etc etc etc.

According to the tab in my Safari preferences, I don't have any extensions loaded at all. The only two plugins I can find are Move-Media-Player and Unity Web Player. I have no InputManagers, InputMethods, or Scripting Additions.

I'm also getting this reload message several times a day though. Is there a way to revert to the previous Safari?

Same problem here. After this message appears all pages in multiple tabs and windows have to be reopened. Not seeing a solution here, but will keep looking.

It's happened to me a lot, and it's extremely annoying. Is Apple even aware of this problem? I don't see a crash report.

Starting to use other browsers

Probalby a good idea to switch to something else for a while until it's fixed.

BTW, someone mentioned extensions (maybe on a different thread). I only have one extension installed (ClickToFlash) and it's not enabled. I see lots of Plugins, but don't know who they were all installed (looks like many must have come from Apple that way and a few others installed by various other apps).

I find that Safari has always suseptable to using various controls quickly while it's paging memory or otherwise busy. Also, the toolbar can blank out sometimes when dragging the a link to it.

I sometimes see this message, not, I think, because Web Content is crashing, but just because of some general slowness. I don't like the fact that message is misleading - basically it tells me that if I want to see the page I'm trying to load, then it will need to reload every single tab I have open. Whenever I have gotten this message, I simply cancel and the page then loads. I didn't need to reload all pages.

There have been times when Safari is acting slugging and I'll see that Web Content is using lots of real memory (like over 2 gigs). And during those times I have sometimes been clicking around apps or tabs and Safari is tries to catch up and instead of waiting I'll happen to click Reload simply out of habit and then I'll get the error message mentioned in this thread. I'll then simple click cancel and the page will load. Why can't the message give some sort of "Wait" option or just have text letting the user know that the page might load fine if they wait? Instead they are lead to believe that they need to reload all of their tabs.

I restarted Safari earlier today and after it re-loaded all the tabs from my last session (around 91, am I going to get yelled at for that number?), Web Content was using about 250 megs of real memory. Leaving Safari alone, I can switch to activity monitor and watch that number slowly creep up and up. (It's currently at about 600 megs.) I don't really understand what safari is doing when I leave it be (and when I don't have any tabs/content being auto-reloaded or playing). But I guess that's a question for another thread.

Me too on this.

My sense is that it happens when there are several pages with several tabs each open in my Safari. Not an acceptable way to handle whatever the problem is. Safari seems to me to be reloading when it doesn't need to be.

In past versions, having Safari open a dozen tabs at once (which I do by command-clicking an item in my bookmarks menu) causes it to grab a ton of cpu time, always a hassle.

Oh, and the dialog box should say "No" instead of "Cancel". "Cancel" isn't an answer the a yes/no question.

I've had a problem like this for the last week or so, it stopped for a day then started again usually freezing with a beachball on apple.com/au/ or ebay.com.au i don't recall it happening on non-Australian pages.... Tonight i was really getting sick of it, So i downloaded google chrome out of desperation and started browsing forums, all i could find was people downgrading and such.
I tried to trash Safari to downgrade and got ""Safari" can't be modified or deleted because ti is required by OSX" so downgrading was therfore out of the question.
After being really peeved off for about 2 minutes I noticed some other people had issues with extensions, the only extension i have is Adblock and i've deleted it and tried Safari in the first few days of the issue, did not solve the problem.
Then I thought, hey, what about plugins... I have a few, mainly the usual ones, flash, etc etc, only one i had out of the ordinary was LogMeIn, "/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ I just Trashed the contents of the folder. Started up Safari, no more issues

I hope this helps someone else.

I kinda doubt it's an extension issue since they're supposed to be sandboxed.

Plugins are also sandboxed and have been for quite some time.

According to Apple:

"WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process."

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2010-April/012235.html

Having one thread crash shouldn't affect others. I'm guessing there is a major problem in the inter-process glue i.e. the controller. It probably chokes when a thread becomes non-responsive due to a freeze or excessive paging due to a bad memory leak.

I'm glad Apple is puching WebKit technology to support sandboxing and multithreading, but Safari 5.1, by my use, is a barely usable buggy piece of crap.

In theory yes.

But just because it's in a sandboxed process does not mean some errant piece of code can't cause it to crash.

It just makes it less messy when it does crash.

Comparatively speaking before this process design in Web Kit 2 come along crashes in the browser were way more catastrophic. A bad bit of code in an ad could crash your browser taking with it the memory of which tabs you had open to which page. Java rendering on a page wrong could lock up the browser.

The point of sandboxing processes isn't to magically make things crash proof - it's to lessen the effect when it does crash.

That's what you're seeing here - one of those sandboxed processes is crashing but it's not actually crashing the browser itself - only the content of the tabs.