Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

need2know - this is exactly what is happening for me, webpage loading freezes or is frozen, beachball of death, activity monitor shows flash hogging resources.

I've followed your suggestion and unchecking the "stop plug-ins to save power" in safari preferences seems to be doing the trick, problematic web pages seem to be running smoothly now. Will see how it goes over the next few days, but this may have helped me!

also, I have not noticed any noticeable power drain on my laptops since unchecking. If anything, I can get my work done faster and use less battery and not have to keep restarting applications or rebooting!

I am glad it's also helped you. Since unchecking the "stop plug-ins to save power" box everything has been fine for me as well. Hope it solves the problem for some people.

A few days later and sorry to say my last post was a bit premature. Spinning ball and crashing has begun again. Why it was ok for a few days I don't know, but doesn't seem as if my suggestion was a permanent fix. 😠

I have similar issues with Safari so much so I've now switched to Chrome for the most part.

2012 retina MBP with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD

Chrome isn't as nice as Safari. But it's fast, and most importantly, it doesn't crash my system!

Some observations from here:

- Symptoms are the mouse cursor freezes and the system becomes unresponsive and/or restarts

- Never had a YouTube crash

- Every freeze was on Facebook.com, except the last. I switched to Chrome for Facebook last month - I'd use Facebook on Chrome, and everything else on a Safari. But the last freeze wasn't on facebook. On the last crash I also got a memory warning - never in the history of owning this machine have I seen that! So that's super unusual. I then closes a bunch of applications and made sure most of my RAM was free - but machine crashed anyway.

The memory warning makes me think that Safari is probably blocking some limited resources. Not actual RAM - I wasn't out of RAM, and even if I ran out of physical memory, I'd still have virtual memory so the error message must be somehow misleading. But maybe it's something else, like sockets, or threads, or whatever - it's running out of something!

Freeze or mini freezes is back for me after more than a month. I cleaned my browser history after a long time yesterday. Today it mini froze for about few seconds like 9-10 seconds then system became slow. I though i had this problem dealt with after disabling flash and internet plug-ins. A friend of mine had similar problem and i disabled his flash and few extensions his problem hasn't come back though. Mine is 15' 2014 version.

An issue that shares some similarities on 2013 Mac Pro's has just been acknowledged a graphics hardware issue:

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/02/06/late-2013-mac-pro-video-issues-repair-progra m/

That article links to the following thread on this forum where people were posting their problems (with tenuously-related issues mixed in, so it can be a tough thread to follow, similar to this):

Mac Pro (late 2013) Graphic Issues

The Mac Pro issue gave most an alert about a graphics card issue at the same time, so it's not similar enough to draw a full conclusion, but useful to note.

I don't think this is related. This problem specifically related to safari in el capitan and flash. For some reason flash was turned on again in options so crash started happening again. Disabled it and its gone. Chrome and every other software has no problems at all for me.

This problem specifically related to safari in el capitan and flash.

The central issue in this thread for the past several months has been confirmed as non-Flash related. Understandably, those who have had a separate issue with Flash have found this thread and commented on occasion without reading too deep into the previous messages. There's is a problem with Safari and a 3rd party extension. The rest of us have a freezing issue with Safari from a fresh install with no 3rd party products installed.

I thought the Mac Pro graphics issue was interesting to note as I specifically found mentions of some affected having UI freezes where the background processes have continued (see the second link), which is a symptom many are having with the core Apple-related freeze in this thread. However, as I mentioned in the last comment, it's not similar enough to draw a full conclusion as I saw no mention of a shared action to trigger the freeze. Many are getting a black screen rather than a freeze and perhaps it's just some users posting separate issues in the same thread, not realising they are different. If the UI freeze is related to the graphics card hardware fault, the shared symptom is of interest enough to me to keep an eye on the Mac Pro issue. But I'm drawing no further comparisons than that for now.

The Mac Pro graphics card recall is also of interest for this reason:

graphics cards in some late 2013 Mac Pros, manufactured between February 8, 2015 and April 11, 2015

I've seen some comments here suggesting or alluding that there may not be a hardware issue with those facing the HTML5 video Safari tab-closing freeze because they don't experience it. I'm assuming the thought behind that is that Macs from each era have the same hardware so it either affects all or none. The above quote is a helpful reminder that something labled as a 'mid-2014 rMBP with an NVIDIA 750M' may have minor changes from another computer labeled 'mid-2014 rMBP with an NVIDIA 750M', down to factory changes of how parts are soldered, etc. Changes that would be difficult to see on the consumer side.

I should clarify that this doesn't make me believe it's a hardware issue I'm dealing with, but I've never ruled it out.

I am posting here because I don't know if it is a Flash issue or a Safari issue. I tried disabling the Flash power saver, but it doesn't change the problem. Certain websites start Flash (even if I specifically respond to the pop-up and tell it not to use Flash), and then it sticks. I have to open Activity Monitor and force quit Flash Player to proceed. Flash player is using 99.8% of CPU capacity. By the way, this problem occurs on my old iMac (mid 2010) and my MacBook Air (2013), so it probably isn't a hardware issue.

I agree it has to do with safari or flash or combination of both. I also agree its to do with el capitan as both me and my fren started having this problem as soon as we installed el capitan. We installed it at same time it came out. Hers is 2013 13 inch version and mine is 2014 15 inch version of macbook pro. 3 major updates to el capitan and problems still persists. Bluetooth devices(both speaker and mouse) are not doing well either. At least yosemite had most problems solved by .3 update. Disabling flash helps for us so try that but sometimes it turned on again for some reason in safari preference. If its hardware issue it effects a lot of mac line products then.

You all are talking about Flash, YouTube, etc. My Safari freezes most often on Yahoo! Mail. Hardly ever use Safari any more. Changed to Firefox and voila! NO PROBLEMS. Have not had one single freeze up since started using Firefox. You all say it's a Flash problem or an extension problem or a zillion other things. May be. But I took all those things out, did all the fixes you all recommended and it didn't work for me. I'm not a super tech so a lot of this stuff is way over my head. Either something works, or it doesn't. And for me, Safari doesn't. Not on my Mac anyway. it's fine on my iPhone and on my iPad and on my older Mac and it didn't start happening until I installed El Capitan. So to my simple mind, it has to be something intrinsic with El Capitan and the latest OS install. This is the second problem that I have seen with an Apple device in less than six months. I got a new iPhone 5S. Found out that it ***** power on occasion, kills your battery and heats up so hot you can't touch it. CPU goes crazy and runs at 100% until there is no more battery power. Apple knows it is a problem but does nothing to fix it. Installed OS 9.2.1 and so far it hasn't happened again. I think there is a bug somewhere in Safari that correlates with El Capitan and Apple needs to fix it. That's all.

You all are talking about Flash, YouTube, etc ... You all say it's a Flash problem or an extension problem or a zillion other things

There are different issues being commented on here, if you read back, that don't have the same cause. This has been a source of a lot of confusion (and a reason I wish the title had now been two separate threads with more specific titles relating to Flash and non-Flash), these are:

1. Issues with the Flash extension in Safari (or, in plain English, anything that uses Flash while you're using Safari) using up way too much CPU or memory.
2. The whole system UI freezing, except for the mouse cursor, when closing or switching from a tab in Safari that has a HTML5 (plain English: not Flash) video somewhere on the page. This issue has nothing to do with Flash.
3. Others

(3) The 'Others' don't seem to have a pattern and are a few comments scattered throughout the thread from people who may have confused their issues with the separate Flash and HTML5 problems, making following their conversation tougher. If you don't have an issue with with Flash or a HTML5 video as the root cause, most suggestions for these will likely do little for you.

(2) This issue has had some more in depth pattern-checking and diagnosing done between all of those having the problem here. There's a lot of comments and updates on it from the last few months. Specifically, this is happening on certain computers that are freshly started and have nothing non-Apple or extra installed - making this directly an issue with Apple.

(1) There is an issue for some macs with whatever way Safari uses the Flash extension. Since Flash is a third party product, Apple (like all companies) are under no obligation to assist with it and will likely suggest dealing with Adobe (the makers of Flash) since the buck stops with them (i.e. if you remove Flash, Safari works fine).

Just jumping back on following yet another crash thanx to Safari (without Flash) on Safari when closing a YouTube window.

Another few minutes of productivity lost because Safari is dysfunctional.

I think it's video-related. The other day I was using Messages for a cell phone call. Safari crashed. The phone call kept right on going as if the system hadn't crashed!

There's ENOUGH information here to fix this issue. (Yes, I have repeatedly sent feedback to Apple - not a single reply).

It is safari and video related. Also it happens mostly while closing the tab with video. For me disabling flash help but there are quite few say it goes beyond flash. My system freezes for for few seconds than crash. Few meaning around 10 sec.