Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

Well after a few weeks of this it's not mine any longer either. Not unless some big changes happen and I'm not optimistic given how long this thread is and how long the problem has been going on. Safari Technology Preview is nice but gives me the same problems. I am now an Opera man until further notice. Smooth sailing ever since I switched. Chrome is working great for me as well. for awhile I thought my SSD was failing. Glad that wasn't the case. Just a badly made browser.

I have a MacBook Pro (mid-2009), 4G RAM, with El Capitan installed. Since installation, I had been experiencing problems with Safari hesitating and freezing. I noticed a comment today from an "older" comment to try disabling plug-ins under Safari preferences - Security. In un-checked the box and right now, Safari is zipping right along. It may be premature, but this appears to have resolved my Safari issue. Murphy's law is no doubt waiting in the wings to pounce.

Could be the Google Talk plugin causing the issue. I notice Google tries to activate it on most of its services (Docs, Drive, etc). Maybe there's some faulty snippet left over on Youtube as well. Will try to disable the plugins all together too.

I run that exact configuration - there are no issues with safari - anything you are experiencing is from some conflicting add-on - security, anti-virus, blah, blah.

Andi run lots of 3rd party software - Office, various specialty programs, etc. But i checlk that each is updated for 10.11.x

You must be knew to this thread. Your comment is completely irrelevant, since this thread is for people who are having issues with Safari.

Ironically, the thread had been discussing a freeze relating to closing tabs in Safari for many months now. Several people who were 'new' have come in the last few weeks to discuss freezes in Safari that don't relate to this discussion and were a separate issue introduced with recent 10.4.x updates.

Are you are unaware of this thread's history, being rude, or just not very familiar with trouble isolation... but assuming th best

I have been part of this since post 1. And its been an illogical ride.

The input to that person is simple - while some configs MAY have issues (there was a group actually looking hard at issues on some models of 2014-15 MBPs w/r/t graphics), the model cited does not have issues - proven by me. You CAN prove a logical positive, you can NOT prove a logical negative. The poster needs to look elsewhere for the root of his problem.

I got this before my freeze today:

23-04-16 16:49:50,000 kernel[0]: process WindowServer[161] caught causing excessive wakeups. EXC_RESOURCE supressed due to audio playback

i am getting irregular total freezes using safari on 10.9.5 with my 2012 rMBP 2.6/512/650m (about once a week, sometimes twice.) when this happens i lose a lot of work as i tend to need about 10-15 applications running at once for my work. saving in all of them every time i make major changes is no way to have to work, so i just accept that every week or so, i will lose some work.

off topic, but on the subject of QC:

for a machine that cost £2500+, i've had so much hassle - three replaced screens, 2 due to extreme image retention, one due to actual exploding pixels. have also had a failed trackpad and failed battery (both of which have been replaced.) the amount of downtime i've had with this machine has been just appalling. the best worst computer i've ever owned.

there is also still a bug with igpu (HD4000) rendering incorrect resolutions in gaming, when using 'direct mode' (not sure of the correct terminology, Unity3D calls it 'capture mode' as opposed to 'fullscreen window'.) as gaming is the focus of my work, and causes addition hassle when trying to game, and has led to me having to port my entire 3 year codebase over to Unity to bypass capture mode and instead use the 'fullscreen window' mode, projecting a quad over the desktop (also this limits resolution on retina displays, another compromise - anyways, this has never been resolved afaik, and has caused me over a year's extra work so far.

In my case everything appears to freeze - the mouse cursor won't move and nothing on the keyboard, not even the volume control keys, will respond. However, the system clearly hasn't completely crashed because the console keeps recording this error approximately every minute:

Apr 26 18:36:03 MacBook-Pro watchdogd[338]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

Apr 26 18:36:53 --- last message repeated 1 time ---

It's as if just the GUI has completely crashed but the OS is still responsive. The problem just started occurring a week ago and nothing on my system has changed in that time, other than installing a camera RAW update which I wouldn't have thought would be a factor. I have stopped all third party apps from running in the background, and have checked that I have no Safari extensions or plug-ins.

Frankly I'm running out of ideas now.

It's as if just the GUI has completely crashed but the OS is still responsive.

Yes, I've confirmed this to be the case with the tab-closing problem. Absolutely any process that was happening before the freeze continues and completes while the computer is frozen. Time-keeping, logs, music playing, etc. It's only the GUI that freezes. However, my mouse cursor does move. Both from the trackpad and from a bluetooth mouse, so there's a difference. No mouse-clicks, swipes or keyboard presses register, just mouse movement.

This is all diagnoses data that Apple could use. Hope they read this thread, or at least acknowledge the problem and try to fix it.

Been having this problem for quite a while, too. Sad to see there's still no solution. I decided to post here, because I had been able to clear my system at one point, but I don't remember enough of the exact details to be very helpful. But maybe someone else can pursue it along these lines, capture the details, and report back. Here's what happened:

After getting the freeze, I went to another mac in our household and connected via ssh to the problem mac (a mid-2014 rMBP running El Capitan - might've had the problem on Yosemite, too, but can't remember for sure). Using the top command, I was able to see what was running and how much CPU (top -d -o cpu). I then started to kill processes that were in stuck state (and a few others just for fun, especially if they had anything to do with graphics or the display). You need to sudo kill -9 to get them (if that wasn't obvious). At some point, I don't remember when, my system freed up completely.

That didn't fix things permanently, of course - it still happens. It's a pain in the butt, for sure. I'm pretty much convinced it's video graphics processing that's at the heart of this problem. I just don't feel like spending the time tracking it down - that's Apple's job.

On the soapbox now: Every one of these little things that Apple chooses not to pay attention to (and pretends doesn't exist) pushes me further toward using one or another Linux full time. Obviously, that's not a perfect solution (and not any kind of solution for most people). But if you're running any Linux, you can run Windows in a VM with VirtualBox and, if you're on a Mac of some sort, you can even run a Mac OS X VM (legally) if you need to. I haven't gotten to that point, yet, but darn, it's getting harder to justify sticking with pure Apple. You could rightly say that I'm on the bleeding edge, and that Apple doesn't have much to worry about, yet, but it's a slippery slope. The sooner they pay some attention and put on the brakes, the more likely they'll be to minimize the impact of the eventual downturn in their business and a brush with Ch 11 (no company is immune, no matter how much they think they are).

So if anyone has a chance to try killing processes and keeping track of what worked, I'd be really interested to hear how it goes.

Some progressive insights there, thanks xgrep. I'm familiar with what ssh is but not savvy enough with it (or have easy use of another computer simultaneously) to try this.

Just to add to your thoughts regarding killing processes until you unfreeze the computer: For those having the tab closing freeze, the GUI freeze typically (but doesn't always) unfreeze if left alone for 30 - 120 seconds. What causes the GUI to self-correct after this time may be relevant to determining the cause?

Agreed, if you wait, you'll often get a few seconds of usability, and things that you had tried to do suddenly get done, but I've found that it doesn't last long. What's especially interesting is that even if you succeed in quitting Safari (or whatever browser you were using to view video when it happened), it doesn't clear the problem (there are various other processes still laying around). Nothing short of a reboot seems to work (except, as I mentioned, managing to find exactly the right process(es) to kill).

Anyway, sure, whatever's going on will eventually allow someone to get to the root cause of it. You have to believe that people at Apple have hit this and that it's as annoying for them as it is for everyone else. Having worked at more than one high-tech company similar to Apple, I can tell you that engineers don't ignore this sort of thing when they hit it. The fact that it's not solved by now leads me to think that (1) it's really hard and they haven't managed to find it or find a fix (frankly, I doubt that's the case), or (2) they know what it is, and it's a hardware bug or something similarly ugly that can only be fixed in future mac products and they don't want to reveal that, as it would be a marketing nightmare and could expose them to lawsuits (you wouldn't believe how often that consideration enters into decisions that you'd think would be purely technical). Didn't somebody at an Apple store suggest "buy a new mac and the problem may go away"? Hey, that was the recommendation I got for a problem with "Other" sucking up memory space on iOS devices (discussed at length elsewhere on these forums and still not fixed after all these years): buy a new one with more memory!

You might recall that there was some discussion way up at the front of this thread about a possible graphics chip failure. That was pure speculation, as far as I can tell, but it may have been uncomfortably close to the truth, if such is known (and I really think that it is - when we were debugging tough stuff like this, we never failed to nail it given enough time and info, and I'm sure that Apple's engineers are every bit as good as my teams were).

So hoping that somebody else has the patience and time to waste .. er, devote .. to killing processes and taking good notes (unlike me - hey, I'm retired, I don't do this for a living anymore).

Not to be too cruel, but how can you live in a house that doesn't have at least two or three computers? I didn't think that was even legal anymore ;-). Seriously, though, you can ssh in from an iOS or Android device with the appropriate app and everyone's got a bunch of those. If you want to fool around with it, I'll give more details. It's not too hard and you can't do too much damage to your mac ("too much" is key, because if you're lucky, you can definitely do some permanent damage fooling with sudo).

I had another thought before I sign off: if people would like to note what kind of CPU and graphic chips their Mac has, we could probably spot some patterns. For the record, my MBP has a 3GHz Core i7 processor and Intel Iris graphics with 1536MB memory. As I said, I suspect it has something to do with graphics hardware (based on nothing but observing symptoms and reading comments in this thread).