Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

I have been reading a lot of posts about safari 9.0.3 crashing due to El Capitan etc...

An issue with long threads like these (one that I can also be guilty of) is that sub-topics already covered, although relevant to the title, can be regurgitated again later when earlier messages aren't read. Along those lines, the discussion of Flash has come up again in recent messages but was already ruled out of a more commonly repeating issue a few of us self-diagnosing patterns were finding. I do understand that some were having genuine issues with Flash but I believe this is a seperate issue from the one that has been discussed at greater length more recently. Just to put the cards on the table again, there seems to be a lot of users having the following issue:

System UI freezes when closing or switching a tab in Safari, often unfreezing after a minute but sometimes not

Under the following conditions:

• El Capitan (all versions)
• Safari (all versions)
• A HTML5 video was embedded and active on the page that was closed/switched from. Appears to be exclusivly YouTube.
• Mid - 2014 mac
• Flash not installed
• No Extensions/extensions disabled
• Fresh install

There's a sizeable demographic having this exact issue with few variations (for example, Safari also froze for some under Yosemite and one or two have this issue with machines from surrounding years).

@Palegreenghosts I agree with you completely, the above bullets you list are comparable to mine and I can recreate the issue by closing the YouTube tab, and to prevent the issue by pausing a few seconds before closing.

@osXcanada, I'm the guy who uninstalled flash (months ago now) and have not run into a website other than one time where the video or graphic would not run. Now obviously, not everyone frequents the same website(s) so I had mentioned in my last post "your mileage may vary." But what I can tell everyone for certain is that I have not had Flash on my MacBook since I uninstalled it months ago and can still recreate this issue by closing a YouTube tab (unless I pause a few seconds as noted previously). Again these are my experiences, I'm not trying to solve this issue I'll leave that to Apple.

I Agree with you completely. My macbook pro is 2014 and this is exactly the issue. Still not official note from apple eh ?

If anyone's having issues with Safari today (Jan 27th 2016) involving the address bar, it's an issue affecting most users worldwide and will likely be resolved soon. I don't want to dwell on it and lead the topic off on a separate tangent as it is a separate bug from the one here and won't linger. Just thought it would help some avoid wasting time trying to fix it or thinking it's related to what we're discussing.

Apple doesn't apologize; this is a very different company now. Can't say I approve 😠.

I mourn the "new" Apple Corporation. Evidently, Apple has reached the maximum( or exceeded) profit of any corporation....but has not been able to generate any new technology? Now, Apple can't censor this. My comments on this forum have been censored....but the general news? Noooooo!

Just wanted to confirm that APPLE has NOT fixed the problem in the 10.11.3 update!

Safari still is broken as of 11:30am PST today.

Unbelievable.

Just wanted to confirm that APPLE has NOT fixed the problem in the 10.11.3 update!

Safari still is broken as of 11:30am PST today.

Unfortunately, yes. I was hoping to save anyone else from getting their hopes up by posting this around when it was released. See my original comment below

The 10.11.3 update today is only a security update and doesn't touch on UI bugs, so don't expect a change. I've had a tab freeze from a YouTube video already. It also doesn't remedy the (I believe, universal?) bug from 10.11.2 of fullscreen YouTube videos not scaling to fit the screen properly on random occasions. The 10.11.4 update is focusing on areas other than security so hold your breath for that one, not 10.11.3.

I'm actually having problems with Safari too, and I'm still running Mavericks. I usually wait to upgrade to see whether any bugs are ironed out, but it looks like it's an issue across all versions of the OS.

I'm thinking it's a Flash Player issue as every time I get a problem (page stops loading, spinning beach ball), Flash Player will be the culprit (it shows in my task killer / force quit)

So it's a common problem right now then?

So it's a common problem right now then?

Have a read over messages in this thread to see if anyone else has the same symptoms. The bug most people who've commented here have doesn't involve Flash but there have been several comments about Flash related problems throughout. I haven't seen a pattern in the Flash-related comments so I don't know how helpful it will be.

It sounds like Flash could be a culprit in your case, which could make any it relevant to any OSX version. The reason that El Capitan (and occasionally Yosemite) has been pertinent here has related to a HTML5 (non-Flash) video bug that's being diagnosed through observing common patterns.

Hope you get it sorted soon. As a suggestion, if you're in a position to switch browser you could try Chrome? It has a different version of Flash than the one you install for Safari and Firefox (I'm assuming you're using Safari as it's the title of the thread).

I will just say that using Firefox presents no problem for me although it uses the same version of Flash. When Safari crashes - Flash Player shows red in Activity Monitor & is using 99-100% of CPU resources - says "plug in fails to respond" . So questions for me is - why does the Flash plug in fail to respond in Safari and not in Firefox - same plug in. I am concluding that there is something in Safari that is rejecting Flash; by accident or design?

After some research regarding Flash Player, I found a suggestion that mentioned internet plug-ins.

Suggestion was to turn off internet plug-ins power saving in: Preferences - Advanced - Stop plug-ins to save power (this is checked as default) - I have unchecked it and so far haven't had any further problems. Not sure what the downside of this would be - can anyone give more information.

Thanks.

The downside could be a greater power usage. (Aside from the security risk that comes with Flash.)

palegreenghosts wrote:

So it's a common problem right now then?

Have a read over messages in this thread to see if anyone else has the same symptoms. The bug most people who've commented here have doesn't involve Flash but there have been several comments about Flash related problems throughout. I haven't seen a pattern in the Flash-related comments so I don't know how helpful it will be.

It sounds like Flash could be a culprit in your case, which could make any it relevant to any OSX version. The reason that El Capitan (and occasionally Yosemite) has been pertinent here has related to a HTML5 (non-Flash) video bug that's being diagnosed through observing common patterns.

Hope you get it sorted soon. As a suggestion, if you're in a position to switch browser you could try Chrome? It has a different version of Flash than the one you install for Safari and Firefox (I'm assuming you're using Safari as it's the title of the thread).

Thanks. Like need2know said, it seems to only happen when using Safari, as when I switch to Firefox it hasn't (as of yet) had any problems. I prefer Safari as my default browser, which is why I'd prefer to get this fixed, especially since all my settings are linked to Safari (and extensions etc).

It's very frustrating in that it just stops the webpage from responding (not the whole browser) and in turn I end up having to kill the Flash Plug-in via Force Quit which is why I'm assuming it's more of a Flash issue.

I'd also love to know what would happen if I disable the Flash plug-in, would it affect anything? Apologies for jumping in on this thread, I realise now this was related to a separate issue, but I appreciate the advice 🙂

If force quitting the Flash plug-in causes the problem to go away then it's definitely an issue with Flash. In particular, the Flash extension for Safari (which is why you're not seeing the issue in Firefox). Why it's happening for some people and not others, I don't know enough to say. Creating an extension for Firefox and Safari is different. The core guts of Flash would be the same but the final bits of how they 'plug-in' (hence the name) to each would be unique.

I'd also love to know what would happen if I disable the Flash plug-in, would it affect anything?

To be pedantic, it will stop anything that needs Flash on a site from working, but won't break anything. I don't have Flash on my computer and I see little issues as sites relying on Flash are a dying breed If I really need to use Flash, I open a site in Chrome, which comes with its own built-in Flash and isn't installed anywhere else on your computer.