Safari keeps reloading every tab

It is possible to stop the automatic refresh as this page explains:

http://stormchild.tumblr.com/post/10414883514/how-to-stop-safari-5-from-unexpect edly-reloading-pages

The measures I take to improve speed and stability of Safari 5.0.6 should resolve some of the issues with later versions. These instructions are for OS X.

1. I flush DNS cache daily at boot - Google for Terminal command for your OS
2. Use a very fast DNS server - find best for you with NameBench or use 8.8.8.8
3. I don't use tabs as they consume too much RAM and slow my old Mac
4. Turn off RSS, Fraudulent sites and Extensions
5. Set Preferences/General/History to one week
6. Adjust Safari Reset to clear everything except history and passwords
7. Start Safari at least once a day with this AppleScript

Decompress the script and put it in Applications and then replace any Safari startup or Dock items with the script.

The script deletes Safari local storage and cache. It then starts Safari and activates Reset using your Reset settings. Those who wish can view the script and edit it with Script Editor.

Quit Safari. Open a Finder window select your Home folder in the Sidebar on the left. Then open the Library folder, then the Caches folder, then the com.apple.Safari folder. Move the cache.db file from the com.apple.Safari folder to the Trash. Relaunch Safari.

If that doesn't help, could be the preferences are corrupted ..

Go to ~/Library/Preferences. Move the com.apple.Safari.plist file to the Desktop.

Quit then relaunch Safari to test. If that helped, move the .plist file to the Trash.

~ (Tilde) character represents your Home folder.

This has been bothering me too, and I might have a possible fix for it.

I did some digging around, and I'm pretty sure this is happening because of a new feature in Safari 5 (more specifically, it's new to Webkit2) called "multi-process windows". You can read some info about it here, but the essential point is that Safari now runs on two separate processes -- one for the user interface (the "UI process"), and one for the content (the "web process"). If any page misbehaves, it can crash the web process, but instead of causing the entire application to quit (which is what would have happened in Safari 4 and earlier), Safari now just silently restarts the web process and then reloads all the tabs you had open.

That's great in theory, but for whatever reason, the web process seems to crash or hang quite often; I see Safari 5 suddenly reloading tabs far more frequently than outright crashes used to occur in earlier versions. The net effect is that this feature that's meant to make Safari more stable has so far caused a lot more problems than it has actually solved.

Anyway, if you enable the Debug menu in Safari (you can do this with TinkerTool or any of several other similar apps; note that this is not a hack, it's simply a hidden setting in Safari, so there should be no problem with me mentioning it here), there's an option in that menu called "Use multi-process windows". I haven't tested it yet (I don't have time at the moment), but disabling that option might stop this "spontaneously reloading tabs" nonsense from happening. I'll look into it later and post a blog entry if I can confirm that this solves the issue (in which case I'll come back and post a link to it in this thread).

This has nothing to do with cache or corrupt preferences. It's a new behavior in Safari 5 due to a major redesign of the underlying engine (Webkit2), which may still have a few bugs. If you don't actually understand the problem, you shouldn't be giving people advice on how to fix it.

Quick follow-up: disabling "Use Multi-process Windows" (in the Debug menu) does indeed stop the unexpected reloading of tabs. After you disable this option, close any Safari windows you have open. New windows/tabs created after that point should say "Untitled [SP]" (where SP = single process).

You can confirm this fixes the problem by loading a couple of web pages into tabs, then selecting "Crash Web Process" from the Debug menu. This would normally trigger the reload behavior, but it will not cause any tabs in an [SP] window to reload.

Excellent, Jason! This is the first reliable fix I've seen for Safari's atrocious behavior.

BTW, Tinkertool did not allow adding the Debug menu to Safari; I had to use a terminal command.

I think I'll stick with Camino for a while yet, but I'm glad to know there's a way to fix Safari.

You're right. I discovered there's no checkbox for the Debug menu in TinkerTool as I was writing my blog post about this (I could have sworn there was at one point…), so I included the Terminal command in my article.

If you like the performance of WebKit, you could also look at Chrome, which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem (because every tab is an independent process, any one of them can crash without causing the rest of them to reload).

Camino is good too. It was written by Dave Hyatt before he was hired by Apple to build WebKit and Safari. Camino uses Gecko (the same engine as Firefox) instead of WebKit, which is still pretty decent.

Jason - thanks for the info. I did this & tabs/pages no longer spontaneously reload, BUT...now AutoFill doesn't work & when I scroll it's 'floaty,' unlike before I made the switch. Do you have any idea why these other things changed, & do I have to go back to flaky reloading to get them back? Thanks for any advice!

yep, I concur that this happens all the time if you have a lot of tabs open. This happened on the old version of Safari but only after 8 hours or so; this new version it starts happening just a few minutes in.

Jason,

Your entries on 18 & 19 Sept. completely resolved the multiple/all tabs loading in Safari. Although Chrome is my preferred browser, I always like to use Safari to keep it up to date but the tab problems had me stumped.

Thank you very much. 🙂

I was having the same problem. Even though I don't use typically use Safari, I didn't want to disable the multi-process windows (via the Debug menu enabled by "defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1").

I don't usually use Safari, but was using it to log into Facebook with a different account than my personal one, so I could test games. It turns out that playing a game on Facebook was a very reliable way to quickly reproduce this reloading-all-tabs behavior, and it didn't matter if it was a Flash game or html game. If I opened a new single-process window and played the game, it'd crash. It seemed to crash even faster if it was an html game.

So I tried all the suggestions that everyone gave in various threads here:

>> tried deleting ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db -- didn't fix it

>> tried deleting ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist -- didn't fix it

>> tried disabling Java -- didn't fix

>> tried emptying the cache (via menu) -- didn't fix

>> tried increasing to 500MB database storage -- didn't fix

>> tried deleting cookies and removing all site data (via prefs/privacy) multiple times -- didn't fix

>> tried uninstalling all extensions and disabling extensions -- didn't fix

Finally, I reset Safari.

Seems to have fixed it for me.

The only way I was finally able to resolve all tabs opening in Safari, was to first export all bookmarks for a backup, clear all caches, then delete all bookmarks, clearing all caches, close Safari, then import bookmarks.

Sometimes even importing back the Safari bookmarks did not work, so I exported my Google Chrome bookmarks and repeated the above process but this time importing the Chrome bookmarks. I did this about a month ago and have not had the problem recur with any Safari bookmarks, tabs, etc. I imagine if you have another browser's bookmarks (FireFox, et al) that you could use those exported bookmarks to import into Safari.

Hope this helps.

Completely resetting Safari (and losing all bookmarks and whatnot) did not help.

When I run an html game in a single-process window and it crashes, then the report consistently shows Thread 0 crashed and the stack trace indicates it happened when playing audio. It always shows the audio stuff in the stack trace. So I'm assuming that the problem is an audio bug, and that there's nothing I can do about it until Apple fixes it.

I'm running Safari 5.1.2 (6534.52.7) on a MacBook (aluminum MacBook5,1) still on Snow Leopard, w/8GB ram.

Thread 0 Crashed: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0 libSystem.B.dylib 0x00007fffffe007c5 __memcpy + 37

1 ...pple.audio.units.Components 0x000000010fb2ac00 AUNetSendEntry + 35487

2 ...pple.audio.units.Components 0x000000010faa87d1 0x10faa4000 + 18385

3 ...pple.audio.units.Components 0x000000010facfe94 SystemOutputAUEntry + 1539

4 ...pple.audio.units.Components 0x000000010fb2c4df AUMultiChannelMixerEntry + 4785

5 ...apple.audio.units.AudioUnit 0x00007fff86869c6e AudioUnitSetProperty + 55

6 ....audio.toolbox.AudioToolbox 0x00007fff86e4156b SubmixGraph::ConnectInputChannel(bool, MixerChannel*, bool) + 425

7 ....audio.toolbox.AudioToolbox 0x00007fff86e42e07 AQMEDevice::AddRunningClient(AQIONodeClient*, bool) + 233

8 ....audio.toolbox.AudioToolbox 0x00007fff86e2600c AudioQueueObject::StartRunning(AQIONode*) + 60

9 ....audio.toolbox.AudioToolbox 0x00007fff86e215ca AudioQueueObject::_Start(XAudioTimeStamp const&, bool) + 638

10 ....audio.toolbox.AudioToolbox 0x00007fff86e2174f AudioQueueObject::Start(XAudioTimeStamp const&, bool) + 27

11 ....audio.toolbox.AudioToolbox 0x00007fff86e3a509 AQServer_Start + 54

12 ....audio.toolbox.AudioToolbox 0x00007fff86e3b843 AudioQueueStart + 169

13 com.apple.MediaToolbox 0x00007fff8301a031 FigAudioQueueStart + 554

14 com.apple.MediaToolbox 0x00007fff830603f0 figAudioQueueRenderPipelineSetRate + 602

15 com.apple.MediaToolbox 0x00007fff83058400 bossSetPossiblyOutsourcedTimebaseRate + 190

16 com.apple.MediaToolbox 0x00007fff8305e822 bossStartTimebaseAndAudioContext + 61

17 com.apple.MediaToolbox 0x00007fff8305f31f figPlaybackBossPrerollCompleted + 444

18 com.apple.MediaToolbox 0x00007fff8305f574 figPlaybackBoss_AllMentorsPrerollComplete + 31

19 com.apple.CoreMedia 0x00007fff84780461 figDeferredNotificationRun + 52

20 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff85cd6bb8 __CFRunLoopRun + 6488

21 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff85cd4d8f CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 575

22 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff8a3a57ee RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 333

23 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff8a3a55f3 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 310

24 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff8a3a54ac BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode + 59

25 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8711deb2 _DPSNextEvent + 708

26 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8711d801 -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 155

27 com.apple.Safari.framework 0x00007fff8103e2be -[BrowserApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 177

28 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff870e368f -[NSApplication run] + 395

29 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff870dc3b0 NSApplicationMain + 364

30 com.apple.Safari.framework 0x00007fff811fc924 SafariMain + 200

31 com.apple.Safari 0x0000000100000f1c 0x100000000 + 3868

This has become a major issue since latest lion update 10.7.3 & none of the suggestions here have helped.

Cant disable Multi-process windows neither as use 1password constantly. Really annoying and dissapointing..!

Yes, also the 5.1.3 update of safari "keeps" these random reloads 😠 I'm with safari 5.1.4 for the developers, I will see if it crashes any (the reload is equal to say "webprocess crash", check the crash in your console, you will see a lot of webprocess-crash.)