I upgraded my MacBookPro to Mountain Lion a short while ago and have been experiencing problems with Safari 6.1 ever since ... page loading issues, quitting and now, Safari is displaying gibberish ... see the attached screen capture. This is not happening in Firefox ... everything acts as it should there, but not Safari.
I have cleared the cache, rebooted my laptop, no fix. Any ideas? Thanks.
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2010), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)
Back up all data.
Launch the Font Book application and validate all fonts. You must select the fonts in order to validate them. See the built-in help and this support article for instructions. If Font Book finds any issues, resolve them.
From the application's menu bar, select
File ▹ Restore Standard Fonts...
You'll be prompted to confirm, and then to enter your administrator login password.
Boot in safe mode to rebuild the font caches. Boot again as usual and test.
Note: If FileVault is enabled on some models, or if a firmware password is set, or if the boot volume is a software RAID, you can’t boot in safe mode. In that case, ask for instructions.
Also note that if you deactivate or remove any built-in fonts, for instance by using a third-party font manager, the system may become unstable.
Back up all data.
Launch the Font Book application and validate all fonts. You must select the fonts in order to validate them. See the built-in help and this support article for instructions. If Font Book finds any issues, resolve them.
From the application's menu bar, select
File ▹ Restore Standard Fonts...
You'll be prompted to confirm, and then to enter your administrator login password.
Boot in safe mode to rebuild the font caches. Boot again as usual and test.
Note: If FileVault is enabled on some models, or if a firmware password is set, or if the boot volume is a software RAID, you can’t boot in safe mode. In that case, ask for instructions.
Also note that if you deactivate or remove any built-in fonts, for instance by using a third-party font manager, the system may become unstable.
Thanks. I did as you said.
Once I tried to restore standard fonts in Font Book, it went thru its process and then told me to reinstall Mountain Lion since some of my fonts were missing. Not sure why that happened as I have never removed any of the system fonts. I am very particular about my fonts as I am a designer.
I do use Suitcase Fusion 5 to manage my fonts, but make sure SF5 always has all the system fonts activated. So far, all seems fine. The gibberish was random. Hopefully it won't happen again.
tlocane --
It was probably a font cache problem, which the Safe Boot cleared.
After going thru the instructions Linc Davis suggested, everything worked fine; but Safari is once again randomly displaying headline gibberish. I have quit Safari and reopened it and the gibberish is gone and the headline displays correctly.
What could be causing this random display?
You checked for duplicate fonts, correct? If not, help here > Font problems and management in OS X
And try troubleshooting Safari extensions and third party plugins.
From the Safari menu bar click Safari > Preferences then select the Extensions tab. Turn that OFF, quit and relaunch Safari to test. If that helped, turn one extension on then quit and relaunch Safari to test until you find the incompatible extension then click uninstall.
If it's not an extensions issue, try troubleshooting third party plug-ins.
Back to Safari > Preferences. This time select the Security tab. Deselect: Allow all other plug-ins. Quit and relaunch Safari to test.
If that made a difference, instructions for troubleshooting plugins here.
Thx Carolyn ... there are no duplicate fonts. That's the first thing I checked. I have one extension installed ... a reload button and the strange behavior happens whether it's loaded or not. It's such a random thing that it's difficult to figure out what is happening. All I know is it started a few weeks after upgrading from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion.
One other strange behavior is Safari will randomly take a very long time to load a page. Sometimes the page is blank and after several minutes, the page finally loads. Other times, the page looks like it's fully loaded but if you look at the address field, you can see the "X" that can stop the page from loading ... this too is after several minutes.
Remove or inactivate Suitcase and see whether there's an improvement.
I actually did deactivate Suitcase ... the gibberish still appears ... albeit very randomly. Now I am able to either relaunch Safari and that usually fixes the problem. On rare occasions, I have to reboot my laptop. So far, it hasn't happened in a few days now.
Safari 6.1 Displays Gibberish
