Q: Amazon crashing Safari today. Had to force shut down.

I am on Mavericks and still have the problem, so it's definitely not OS specific. It doesn't happen to me all the time, but by now when I go to Amazon.com I always start searching right away for what I want, so my browser doesn't linger on that homepage very long.

I am running my 2009 15 MBP on the integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M most of the time, I wonder if the crashing would occur on the dedicated GPU.

Hi folks,

My name is Kellen and I work on the Amazon engineering team that’s responsible for the homepage. We’ve been working on getting to the bottom of the browser freezing/crashing issue that you’ve described, but so far haven’t been able to reproduce the issue. We’d really like to solve this problem for you and the rest of our customers ASAP, and would certainly appreciate it if you could provide some additional information to help move our investigation along. If you’d be willing to help, please shoot an email to kelgrant ‘at’ amazon.com.

Thanks!

Kellen

Hi Kellen,

For me, the crash/freezing has been going on for about 4 months.  I do all of my online shopping using Amazon, (quite frequently I might add), and for these last 4 months, it has been a frustrating experience.

When I first open Amazon using Safari, the DVD movie page comes up fine, (most of the time I order DVD's of movies).  The Amazon page offers "suggestions" on other movies that are similar… I click on one of the "suggestions," and then it tries to go to the "suggestion" that I clicked on, and loads about half of the page, and then freezes.  The page stops responding, so I have to, "Force Quit" the page, and then I quit Safari altogether.  Then I open Amazon.com again, and type in the name of the movie, that was, "suggested"  That page loads up, and I enter the item in the cart, then I want to also put into the cart the name of another DVD.  When the page tries to go to the 2nd DVD, it freezes again, so I have to do another "Force Quit", and close out of Safari.  I then reopen Safari to go back to Amazon, to try to put the 2nd DVD into the cart.  And it freezes again.

Many times I have just given up on trying to purchase DVD's, or other items from Amazon.

Amazon works great if I just order one DVD, but I would like to order a number of additional items in order to go above the $35 "Free Shipping" minimum.

Over the last 15 years, I have purchased literally hundreds of items from Amazon, totaling in the thousands of dollars… all without a hitch… except for the last 4 months, when it has been an exercise in futility.

Jim

Hi Jim,

Sorry to hear it has been so frustrating! I'm not totally sure I know which pages you're referring to, but if you send me an email (kelgrant 'at' amazon.com) with a few screenshots of the problematic pages I'd be happy to help troubleshoot (you might want to use a different browser so your pages don't freeze up on you).

Thanks,
Kellen

BIG Thanks to Kellen and the crew at Amazon- that's proactive customer service! I really appreciate their efforts tracking down the problem we were having with the Amazon homepage.

I think I had accidentally installed CLEAN MY MAC HELPER because it installed in conjunction with a remote app I had installed, and when I looked in the console I saw that it was oppressing before the Kernal shut down - so I uninstalled and it fixed the hard crash problem!!