Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

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.

The Flash and HTML5 video tab switching freezes are different issues. While they're both being discussed in the same thread I think it's easier if the two aren't treated as the same to avoid confusion. Forgive any abruptness that might be coming across - if you feel I might be jumping to conclusions I'd recommend reading the last 12 pages in order to see what led me to this.

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!

Indeed, I've been purposely wording the HTML5 video issue as UI freeze in my comments for the last while, not a system freeze.

(If anyone's not familiar with what a UI is, it's the user interface. In English, this is everything you see on your screen - how OSX is presented to you - and not what it does in the background, calculations, audio, etc. The only bit of the UI that's not freezing is the mouse cursor, which continues to move).

In some of my past comments where I mentioned this I gave some examples of music continuing to play if it was doing so and any video renders (plain English, saving something to video which can take hours) continuing and finishing if I leave the computer frozen for a few hours. I see no visual hint that it's finished rendering but found that it went on as normal when I force a restart. Also, the time display in the top right will stay frozen at the exact moment it happened but any background task that saves time to text (e.g. the console) will show that time was still being kept and saved to various logs after the freeze occurred.

This could mean it's video hardware related, yes, but not enough to prove so. The UI only relies on video hardware for small parts. I would be interested in knowing if the tab closing/switching action is causing a freeze because of trying to draw the new tab or trying to wind down the existing one. Possibly the latter as there's a pattern in that the tab that's being closed/switched from has a HTML5 video, whereas the new tabs share no traits. Does winding down a HTML5 video to draw a new tab in Safari involve a certain part of hardware? Maybe, maybe not. I can't get any further than that yet.

This is a "me too" post. I'm on an MBA 13 Mid-2013 (or early 2014...). Intel HD5000 GPU.

When switching tabs in Safari from a Youtube video - it's russian roulette. In the system logs are the gory details of the GPU crash. During this time - I was able to ssh in and look around. While I was doing that - my desktop came back (but Safari was running very slow). I shut everything down clean and restarted.

Has anyone installed one of the dev. previews of 10.11.4 ? I read through a lot of this thread (but not every page) - spologies if someone already mentioned this.

Sounds very familiar. I haven't been able to find anything obviously GPU related in my own system logs (possibly through ineptitude rather than them not existing).

Has anyone installed one of the dev. previews of 10.11.4 ? I read through a lot of this thread (but not every page) - spologies if someone already mentioned this.

I haven't. I've been reading the comments of those who've installed it but this hasn't born much fruit in terms of any revelations on this particular problem. Unfortunately discussions on the developer previews seem to be quite selective and patchwork on issues they raise. For example, I keep reading about people eagerly hoping for a fix of an periodic internet disconnection bug (one I experience) and a periodic bluetooth mouse disconnection bug (one I don't). I read a lot of comments when 10.11.2 introduced a bug to Safari where fullscreen HTML5 videos would scale incorrectly. 10.11.3 didn't solve the issue (it appears to have focused solely on security) but I haven't seen anyone mention this on comments about 10.11.4 - as I said, the comments are very patchwork and not very conclusive about issues that were resolved.

I have read about one widespread bug in Safari being addressed. If you clicked a link in Twitter and it used its t.co forwarding and analytics domain, it would fail to load until you tried it a few times. An oddly specific bug but one that was affecting lots.

People who are having mini freeze and crash because of flash. Clearing history will reset the plugins in security options and flash will be active again. That was causing my freezes to come back after clearing history.

It's the EBATES plugin that's causing Safari to hang for me almost daily. Try disabling that single extension and see what I mean.

So guys.. after around 3 weeks of no freezes today it happened twice. Single scenario as usually. Closing a tab in safari which contained a youtube vid caused the whole OS X UI to freeze. Music from other tab keeps playing and the only active element was the cursor. Nothing new.. so for me it's the first proof that 10.11.3 still hasn't solved the problem 😟

It happened twice with the same vid (pretty cool by the way 😉 ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjeKw0B8PG8 try it out and give me a shout

Hope that someone will find the fix... APPLE is a great candidate for it, isn't it?!

cheers

It's the EBATES plugin that's causing Safari to hang for me almost daily. Try disabling that single extension and see what I mean.

EBATES is unrelated to the issue this thread is discussing. Nobody else has mentioned having EBATES installed. Most have turned off all extensions. Interesting to note that issue as well though.

Irene on page 10 said she had EBATES installed, that's how I found this thread on Google. But like you said, this thread is not based on EBATES so it won't help me much.

I did an upgrade about 3 days ago that i regret, I do not have the desire to do a wipe and clean install. I have been doing some of the settings suggestions, and have not had an issue in the last 15 minutes since i did the font smoothing. I had major beach ball issues about an hour ago and all i had open was gmail, yahoo mail and the AT&T website. If i got 10 beachballs before the upgrade over the last year I would be surprised.

so much for that, beachball back on jetblue. I'm using my rock solid 2004 xp desktop to type this while i wait for the BB to go away😉

In my case, its going from bad to worse. Now Safari lags and freezes more often and not just on closing a tab with html5 video. Now it consumes more memory for some reason, its heavy making my mac slower.

14 pages, and still no reasonable solution eh? Not even a message from Apple? Great

I also had problems with Safari, roughly since I updated to El Capitan. The problem started slow, and grew bigger and bigger until I couldn't use it anymore. Safari kept freezing and for a few times it crashed my whole OS on MBP. For a few times I had to simply use the hard button to shut it down as Force quit was not available. I think I am still lucky my MBP still works. I switched to Firefox and it works like a breeze. I used to think my MB was too old (mid 2010), but with Firefox it is like blitzkrieg. I almost can't believe how quick it is. That makes me think the hot ball is not so much in my computer or El Capitan but for Safari.

What can I say, I loved Safari when it worked. I tried to deselect the font smoothing option...now I play Die Enfurhung aus dem Serail on you tube on Safari, but I write this mess on Firefox. The you tube works nicely (it's HTML5)...I hope the spinning wheel won't dance again when I turn you tube off.

Freezing was NOT limited to you tube...Apple, what are you doing??? Are you sleeping?

I tried using chrome and still get the beachball. This is after setting upp another account. I do not use youtube so it must be some flash issue. I will try Firefox.

I tried using chrome and still get the beachball. This is after setting upp another account. I do not use youtube so it must be some flash issue. I will try Firefox. Also, I'm on my eighth or ninth run of etre and have deleted files along the way, MY MACAIR was working wonderfully before this it is only safari that is messed up

Just to keep this thread on track, it sounds like your issue is different. I think we've ruled out Flash since most here don't have Flash installed.