Safari DNS problem in Yosemite? Works, then slow death...

Thank you phatfish81!

I have made those changes (but did a screen shot of what they were before the change just incase 🙂)

I don't connect with wifi so I changed the DNS via the Thunderbolt Ethernet tab.

Held my breath and logged out...

All's well. Many thanks.

Hi everyone,

I think I found the answer to at least my problem with Safari.

In my case I accidentally installed the Genieo Search Engine, instead of DuckDuckGo. I read some articles on either Search Engine and when installing Yosemite a window of Genieo flashed on my screen, which I accidentally approved. Stupid me!!!

In any case since then Safari kept on stalling at random. Sometimes after an hour but always after a sleep mode the next morning. Really very annoying.

I read some articles on ZDnet.com and other interesting sites, where my attention was drawn to the fact that Genieo leaves Threats behind if you uninstall the program. Well it did with me, in invisible maps deep down in OSX.

After further investigation my attention was drawn to a virus scanner called Sophos Anti Virus. I used it on my old PowerMac but I did forget about it until I read the article. So being familiar with the program I installed it on my MacBookPro. I scanned my Laptop which took about 2 hours or so and the following screen was splashed:

Sophos found the infected thread somewhere deep in the dungeons of OSX's invisible Directories. I had it removed and to my great surprise Safari has not stalled at all so far.

Safari works great again, and I recommend that all of you give it a try with Sophos. It free and it solved my problem.

Good luck,

Hans.

Hans,

I assume you are not a representative of Sophos, in that case I say "get lost".

You have not really done your reading around very good:

1. To get rid of Genieo you use AdwareMedic from our malware and security specialist Thomas Reed: thesafemac.com , as you can read in hundreds of threads here.

2. Sophos should not be installed at all: NO "on-access" antivirus app works well in OSX, all are creating issues. As you can read here in hundreds of threads here. You should uninstall it.

goedendag verder,

Lex

Thank you Ron2you!! Setting IPV 6 to local-link only worked for me as well. This issue just started for me on 2/16/15 for some reason, but this fixed it.

It appears that there might be several potential fixes. I'll add one to the mix that may help someone.

Macbook Pro mid 2012. Every since moving to Yosemite, Safari would stall. Restarting Safari made it all work again. Nothing else has issues, Chrome, Firefox, etc. Gone through every update, no resolution, so I moved to Firefox and had no issues with that having the same problem.

I've reinstalled, created new profile and tried heaps of solutions listed in this thread - no solution to Safari stalling.

I realised, after much hair loss, I'm using a proxy server with authentication, and maybe the fault lay here.

So what I did was to install Authoxy to handle authentication, then pointed Safari to use 127.0.0.1 (authoxy) with no authentication.

Several hours now - no stalling. And strangely, Safari runs way quicker in loading pages!

Hopefully this might help someone, and this "fix" works permanently for me.

On my computer it's worst! It does not even connect... I'm being forced to use google chrome instead.

Wish I could say this fixed my issue. I am working with a server using AD and for some reason Safari is the only browser (after figuring out Firefox 30+ needed NTLM configurations) that does not work from OSX to access the site. It does require authentication (AD credentials) to access the server and for some reason Safari does not like it. Good news to me though is unloading the discoveryd as you described brought it from a constant trying to load to a cannot find server error so it seems related for sure.

Thanks for the info continuing to dig.

After I tried almost everything mentioned in this thread (Google DNS servers, IPV6 config etc.) and nothing worked I decided to check one more thing - /etc/hosts file. If you have more than one row with records for the 127.0.0.1 IP, Safari will read only the first row. Example:

127.0.0.1 mydevdomain.dev anotherdomain.dev

127.0.0.1 my_third_domain.dev

If you have this in your /etc/hosts file, Safari will succeed with only the first two domains. The third one will fail.

So if you have something like this simply delete the last row and append the domain(s) to the previous one and everything will work.

Confirming what others have said:

1) Safari, iTunes Store, and App Store access all go out at the same time. Firefox, Thunderbird, and Chrome all work fine.

2) In Safari, progress bar goes about 1/8 of the way across then stops.

3) Restarting solves the problem until it eventually occurs again (after a few sleep/wake cycles)

4) Switching DNS to 3rd-party servers works immediately (Safari, iTunes Store, and App Store immediately load without my having to do anything directly to them) but temporarily (through a few sleep/wake cycles) then it eventually occurs again

5) Just on a hunch, when #4 happened, I went back to my provider's DNS server and Safari, iTunes Store, and App Store all connected again immediately without my having to do anything directly to them.

So it appears to be that changing the DNS server clears the problem, then when the problem occurs again you can go back to your original server.

I didn't try the sudo suggestion as I am logged in as a non-admin so it doesn't recognize my password as authorized for sudo.

---

The above is a comment I apparently tried unsuccessfully to post a few months ago. It has proven correct after time. Switch to Google DNS addresses, content loads nearly instantly, content eventually stops loading after anything from an hour to days, switch back to ISP's IP address, content loads nearly instantly, content eventually stops loading after anything from an hour to days, switch back to Google DNS, etc.

For OpenDNS.

Open System Preferences > Network > Advanced > DNS

Click + and type:

208.67.222.222

Click + again and do the same.

208.67.220.220

Click OK.

This solution worked for me. Thanks!

Hey guys!

I spent hours trying to figure this out and I spent hours chatting with Apple Support. I had restarted my computer on Safe Mode and the internet would work just fine, so we figured out it was a third party app affecting the internet connection. It happens to be that Sophos, the antivirus, updated to something new and it wasn't allowing my computer to make the right connections. I deleted it and boom, my thing is now working!!

Hope that this helps someone!

This worked for me too, thanks phatfish81. Hanging on Google drive and other sites randomly in Safari and Chrome was a huge issue getting my work done but this change did the trick.

This is a rather strange issue. Nothing you posted worked for me. Only restart of the OS. Now, I don't have a solution yet, but there is a list of things I tried, that didn't work for me, and my personal findings:

• This started, I think, with Mavericks already. I have a MBPr 13'' late 2013.
• First, only Safari seemed to be affected, Chrome worked, every other online app worked.
• After upgrade to Yosemite the issue reappeared. 10.10.2 probably fixed other related issues with wifi etc.
• I have completely disabled all proxy settings for my eth and wifi connections, which seemed to help (cca jan-feb 2015)
• Few days ago I came to work, opened my MBP and the issue was back. But now even Chrome didn't work. Even Firefox. Then I figured everything using HTTP connections is broken. Ping worked, SSH worked, Exchange in Mail.app seemed to be OK. OS reboot helped.
• When I came home (lid closed, ie. MBP was sleeping/hibernating) the issue was back.
• I tried everything suggested here. Notably:
  • Turning off IPv6 (set to link-local).
  • Deleting my IPv6 address from active network interface.
  • Reloading discoveryd service.
  • Clearing DNS caches.
  • Tried to log out and log in between these attempts.
  • Switching from wifi router connected to DSL broadband to iPhone hotspot (browsing on iPhone worked fine, not so on Mac).
  • Activating SOCKS proxy (via SSH tunnel) made all things work. Deactivating the proxy made all things bad again. I could repeat this with the same result every time.
  • Then I figured HTTPS connections worked! I could brows Google, Facebook, go to my bank account etc. All these sites use or can use HTTPS. http://apple.com didn't work but https://apple.com did!
  • Opening website via its IP address instead of domain name did nothing, too. I couldn't even get to my router web administration that definitely works just via its IP address.
  • Then my friend suggested to try telnet connection to his site to port 80 (standard HTTP). No matter what I typed after successfully connecting to his server, it just did nothing. I tried typing some HTTP request code etc. but no response. The telnet program just hung there. I could still type into it but that was all that happened. I had to kill the telnet process every time.
  • During these attempts I have turned off firewall and web security options in my ESET suite just to be sure. OS X firewall is of course turned off, too.

So to summarize what I found out:

• DNS seems not to be the issue, although clearing DNS caches might help, too.
• I know there are said to be some issues with Apple's IPv6 but switching it off didn't seem to do anything.
• HTTPS worked, ping worked. HTTP didn't. All suddenly worked after activationg SOCKS proxy and went right back after deactivating it.
• I didn't try any site via HTTP running on different port than the default 80.
• So I think there is a service in OS X that breaks down. I just have to find out which one that might be. Some really weird stuff there.

I have the same issue and I couldn't agree more with your post. A reasonable explanation of what may be going on here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-10-is-broken-and-what-yo u-can-do-to-fix-it/

This fixed it for me! thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!