Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

Seems there are quite a few who have had problems with Flash and Safari - me for one. I have disabled Flash in Safari, keeping it solely for use with Firefox in which it causes no problems. Since doing this my beachball has disappeared and Safari is much much faster.

Anyway, I think if you look back through this very long thread you will see those that have Flash Player misbehaving in Safari.

I just disabled Flash and the beachball doesn't last as long...............so thanks for that. Still searching for answers.....................

I'm sure there are people having problems with Flash (Flash issues go back for years), but that's for another thread. This one is specifically issues with Safari and YouTube (and possibly a couple of other sites people have mentioned) where the entire GUI is brought to a halt when Flash is NOT installed after closing a YouTube window or tab. I've read every message and written throughout the thread since last November. Flash is only mentioned here as a means to eliminating it as the problem. Most have either done a clean install and/or removed Flash entirely (other than Chrome's built-in implementation). I think only one person mentioned an issue with Chrome (which may possibly be related to the issue you're discussing). I've never had a problem with Chrome and Safari. @SDf007 specifically said he's not using YouTube and that he suspects Flash.

This thread has been sent to Apple's attention multiple times. Flash issues should be in a different thread.

I share your frustrations Adam, and have attempted to spell out and distinguish the difference between those having a separate Flash issue and confusing others' advice in past comments. However, many who comment in this thread are not going to read others' advice and insights beyond a few messages and the same contradictions and confusion will perpetuate. The conversation is going round in circles. Most of these commenters stumble on this thread from Google. And as frustrating as it is for anyone trying to follow progress in the thread, the Flash-extension issue technically does technically fall under the thread title for some having it (Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan).

Therein lies the second and biggest contributor to the confusion. The thread title is too broad. They should be separate topics but none of us can change it. In the meantime I've started commenting on a more specific thread here:

Closing tabs in Safari freezes Macbook

Yes, it may be too much to expect people to glance through the start of the thread or even the last few comments (including yours) to realize this isn't discussing a flash issue. It's a bit of laziness.

I figured you've chimed in to get this back on track a few times and it was my turn 🙂

It's sad and unfortunate that this thread even needs to exist all this time later.

I think the OP should edit his (hers?) first post and add a note in big letters that this thread does not consider flash related bouncing beach ball thing but the UI freezing after closing safari tab with youtube vid problem. Perhaps it will help avoiding many unrelated replies.

cheers!

The problem is in safari we can all agree. Flash may be culprit for some, for some may be not. But everyone's problem with safari here with freeze and beachball. That what the OP post say so we are discussing it here. No need to dismiss plp as we are still talking about safari. For me i am done with this nonsense meanderings thread posting about other plp rather than problem at hand. May be you guys should read OP rather than us. It has to do with his/her macbook pro not mac pro either.

Thank you for your thoughts on this. I have also uninstalled flash from my Macbook air and spent a considerable amount of time trying to trouble shoot this problem. I had no issues prior to the upgrade and was very happy. I have enjoyed my apple experience because of the closed implementation of Unix and the relatively trouble free nature of upgrades on this and my families iPhones and Ipads. If we now need to have an approved products list and software compatability matrix every time an upgrade comes out, then perhaps Apple needs to have a S/W check prior to installation.

I'm having the same problem, Retina 15 inch MacBook Pro (late 2013) running OS X El Capitan 10.11.3.

I've had the issue ever since upgrading to El Crapitan, but I did not have it on Mavericks or Yosemite.

I'll be watching a YouTube video in Safari, and sometimes as I close the tab, the entire system except for the mouse completely freezes for 10 to 60 seconds. It almost always unfreezes itself within at most a minute or so and everything is back to normal, but sometimes it takes longer and I'll do a hard reset (maybe given enough time it would unfreeze eventually).

During the hangs, my console log usually says "kernel[0]: Trying to restart GPU (Intel Iris Pro)..."

... as well as "Spotlight[357]: XPC connection was invalidated" many times.

The GPU restart log mentions "MAIN Ring is hung in a batch buffer <-- ROOT CAUSE!", whatever that means.

Here are two logs of one of the recent hangs:

Here's the Console log

And here's the GPU Hang log

It happens about once a day ever since installing El Capitan, very annoying.

I don't have Flash installed.

I was hoping that 10.11.1 would fix it, or .2, but by .3 it still hasn't been fixed, so I'm losing hope of a future fix.

I know Apple has a bad reputation when it comes to failing GPUs, and I've had that happen with a previous Mac, so I'm wondering if this could be a hardware issue. Can we even rule that out?

I'm not a huge expert when it comes to hardware and I haven't looked at the log files you provided, but I'd like to share that I had the same experiences on my Retina MacBook Pro 13" (mid-2014) under OS 10.11.3. I talked to Apple Support a number of times and tried plenty of different approaches to resolve the issue, including wiping out all data associated with Safari and reinstalling the OS. It didn't help, so I backed up my data, wiped my entire disk and simply reverted to Yosemite (10.10.5) using Internet Recovery Mode.

It's been a week now and I haven't had any crashes or system freezes whatsoever (finally there's no need to do a hard reset every other day!), so I really doubt that it was due to a hardware problem. It's just that the quality of OS 10.11 is too bad at this point. After waiting for so long for these bugs to be fixed, I'm really happy I took the time to have my Mac running an OS that is actually usable.

I'm not a coder but I'm starting to lean towards Metal as a possible problem. Metal is new to El Cap and could be videos toying with our GPU's in a way that Apple hasn't been able to resolve yet. I'm the same as most....no Flash installed, no extensions, nothing like that. The issue only arises while watching a YouTube video then closing the tab to switch to another. My "solution" has been to pause the video, close the tab, then wait about a minute before doing anything else. When I do that, no issues whatsoever. But I obviously should not need to do that manual workaround with a $2,500 laptop!! 😮

Everyone talks about Flash and videos and closing tabs in Safari and one or two of you offer snide remarks when some of us who aren't maybe as tech savvy mention other sites--problem is1. Updating to El Capitan 2. Freeze ups and beach balls on multiple sites, not just YouTube or other videos and 3. Telling people (like me) that we should follow ALL the posts. Sorry, but Safari freezes up on Yahoo mail for me and gives me lots of problems on FaceBook and i have done all your fixes until I'm blue in the face and I'm just done with Safari in El Capitan Firefox works just fine on all sites. Period. So when Apple finally fixes Safari I'll think about using it again. In the meantime, please keep snarky comments to yourself unless you have something positive about a fix. This isn't directed to previous poster but to one or two others on these pages. Comments are supposed to helpful.

MMaybe if the freezing on various sites was FIXED we wouldn't have such a long thread!

I enrolled in the Beta program so I could get updated to 10.11.4 (currently beta 3). Kinda desperate in doing this - I've never done this in the years of using OSX.

So far so good. I've bee able to watch Youtube in a tab, close it, etc. Perhaps I havent' 'stepped on the landmine' yet - but there's a chance they put a fix in.

https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/

So I'm not recommending anyone to do that. It's your decision if you want to try it. Obviously the risk is running 'beta' software could introduce other issues. So far for me - it's been fine.

My versions (of what I think is relevant...) are:

Safari - Version 9.1 (11601.5.13)

com.apple.driver.AppleIntelHD5000Graphics - 10.1.4

Again - these are my versions that I'm now on 10.11.4-beta3. Also - I have an MBA 13 2014 (hence the Intel HD 5000).

Those of you on 10.11.3 can check these on your system and compare - if you version is lower than what I have - I'm assuming Apple made changes to Safari + GPU driver.

The last one will be different depending on what GPU you have. I got that from 'kextstat' in the Terminal. You will need to do something like:

kextstat | grep -i graphic

And look through the output to try to find your GPU driver.

@vom

Many thanks for reporting what you've found about this. 10.11.3 was mentioned throughout the beta phase as focusing exclusively on security fixes so I didn't hold out much hope for a fix (and there wasn't). 10.11.4 has not been security only so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I've seen comments about 10.11.4 betas referring to the fullscreen video bug (incorrect scaling) being addressed in Safari so it would have a different version. The latest one available for 10.11.3 (that I'm currently using) is:

Safari - Version 9.0.3 (11601.4.4)

My integrated GPU driver for a mid-2014 15" rMBP is:

com.apple.driver.AppleIntelHD5000Graphics (10.1.2)

Please do comment back on what you find.