Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

xgrep - I believed your issue was the same as mine but your freezing symptoms appear quite different. As well as being able to move my mouse cursor, I don't get intermittent restorations of the GUI. It either comes back completely after 30 - 120 seconds (80% of the time) and remains active, or doesn't come back at all and I have to hard reset. Just to clarify, you are having the freeze that's triggered by closing a tab in Safari that contains an embedded HTML5 video? You'd be the first person I've come across to have separate symptoms as others have clarified the same symptoms as mine with clean installs.

As i waited for around 30 seconds i could force quit Safari. While in Activity Monitor i didn't notice any CPU, memory usage peak or hung processes like xgrep said. All looked fine except Safari - pages wouldn't load, choppy animations etc. and this kept going on until reboot.

I did remove all caches and history - i never cleared history until about 2 weeks ago, only caches and site data - and all looks fine, no freeze since then. If that's the case, i don't understand how come people with clean installs still had this issue.

It sounds like the symptoms I've seen are somewhat different from yours. But we are definitely seeing a freeze related to viewing video (presumably in a browser).

I, too, was not able to see anything useful in Activity Monitor. Using the top command in a terminal window, however, does show things that AM doesn't.

I have the same problem while playing the videos on my MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015) with Safari Version 9.1.

It hangs my laptop and I need to force shutdown the laptop.

Sunil

I think we have a smorgasbord of problems, which in a way would be too bad if true.

My problem really doesn't match exactly any I've read. Mine freezes are often on content-heavy pages, but not always. My mouse moves, and it's sorta functional. It won't do anything with an open Safari page, which is frozen, but it can close that tab, and, it can go to the Apple menu and select force quit, and I can force quit Safari. Or, sometimes everything is "working" but web pages partially load. If I try to copy anything on the part of the page that's open, Safari freezes. If I click another tab, everything is normal on that tab.

I almost never have had to do a hard restart

I mentioned earlier, I hope on this thread 😀 , that I'd used Abode's uninstaller on Flash, and after using it I found one more Flash plug-in using a cmd+F search. Here are the details on what it found:

Kind: Plug in

Size: 46,874,812 bytes (46.9 MB on disk)

Created: Monday, December 28, 2015 at 6:42 PM

Modified: Monday, December 28, 2015 at 6:42 PM

Version: Adobe Flash Player 20.0 r0 Copyright (c) 1996-2016 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved

Last opened: Monday, December 28, 2015 at 6:42 PM

This is just about the time I began having the Safari problem.. The plug-in was in the Disabled Plug-in folder. I trashed it and reset Safari. Dang it guys, that fixed things for me. It's been about a week.

I've got a late-2013, 15 inch MBP Retina, 2.0 GHz i7 core, 8 Gb RAM, SSD, with a Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB GP.

My problem really doesn't match exactly any I've read.

Ripe Avocado - The problems that you're discussing aren't related to the subject of this thread. This thread is limited to the Safari/YouTube GUI freeze issue...which has amazingly extended to 25 pages now without a peep from Apple. I would suggest starting (or finding) another thread with a subject related to content-load issues in Safari.

Maybe, maybe not. All I know was there are many of us getting the exact symptoms I described with the exclusive trigger being the closing or switching of a Safari tab containing an embedded HTML5 player on a factory-fresh/clean-install 2014 Mac. I'll save everyone from reposting what I've restated many times throughout this thread but the content's all there from myself and others if anybody wants to read at a later point.

The shared cause and symptoms with many were worth investigating and we did some diagnosing which ultimately hit a dead end. Apple don't acknowledge they're aware of the issue on any of their support channels other than when it's filed as a bug report by a developer, at which point they will remove it as it's a 'duplicate'.

@palegreenhosts - Thought this may be of interest to you...

I've noticed that the same problem occurs occasionally when switching out of a YouTube window (NOT closing it) quickly after posting a comment/reply. I don't do this often, so it may just not have come up before.

This could mean that the problem is related to code unrelated to the video playback.

@Adam F: I've only recently stopped describing the issue as in this thread as Safari tab closing/switching because I felt it was sounding a little too technical every time I was explaining it to comments comparing a different issue. See back throughout this thread where I used to mention that switching away from a tab had the same likelihood as closing it to cause a GUI freeze for me (under the same embedded video conditions).

Unless I misunderstood you, this has always been part of the issue as I know it. The GUI freeze happens at the exact moment Safari renders an animation in the tabs attempting to show the newly selected tab being the one in focus (after switching tabs) or the tabs expanding to fill the vacated space (after closing a tab). As both actions involve bringing focus to a previously inactive tab (either a new one or an existing one) I would have assumed the focus on the new tab was instigating the freeze.

However, the freeze doesn't happen unless the tab that's been switched from or closed had an active HTML5 video and is now either playing or paused. With this fact, I can only draw a conclusion that something in Safari that 'winds down' (excuse the lack of a better term) a tab that has an active HTML5 video causes the GUI freeze - completely impartial to whether that tab has been completely closed or switched from.

That's a perfect description of the issue, same here. It has a strangely specific preference of happening right when the tab-sliding-over animation happens after having watched a YouTube video.

So now we have 25 pages of this and no one has a real solution (it seems, I don't want to go back and read every post). It's really looking like there won't be a solution unless Apple specifically addresses it. We'll just have to upgrade to 10.12 as soon as it comes out, which I really don't like doing. Either it fixes it, or it introduces more bugs as it usually is the case.

It has a strangely specific preference of happening right when the tab-sliding-over animation happens after having watched a YouTube video.

Yes, it's only ever happened at this exact moment for me.

I'm afraid there hasn't been a solution anywhere in this thread that wasn't false hope brought on by coincidences. Personally I've few reasons to believe this isn't a minor hardware issue at this stage - due to the amount of time that has elapsed since this was reported to Apple and the severity of its symptoms on a selection of their laptops from 2014. Historically, to the best of my knowledge, they have not acknowledged an issue on MBPs until going public with a recall*.

Of course, there's plenty of reasons to doubt it being a hardware issue. Primarily, why only Safari? Perhaps because of its tight integration into OSX, using fundamental parts of the OS that other browsers don't. But that's not enough to qualify the argument. I would love some insight from anyone working on WebKitView and system calls it performs to get a better idea. Using different renderers, such as the ones Chrome and Firefox use could negate any reference to calls to the OS that cause the GUI freeze without any effort on the developers part. Or else the developers of the Mac versions had to rewrite some standard calls to bypass troublesome freezes. It's worth noting that Chrome did freeze for me when I first got my laptop in 2015 and was playing videos on Yosemite. I moved away from it quickly and unfortunately can't remember the specifics now. All I know is that it no longer freezes.

* Not the same issue but an example here. I believe those with random restarts and distorted graphics had no acknowledgement that Apple was working on the issue until this announcement. The class action lawsuit(s) may or may not have prompted the announcement:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2886966/apple-offers-free-fixes-for-macbook-pros -with-video-problems.html

I'll repeat my opinion on this: I believe that the problem is related to graphics hardware, and that it occurs on systems with a specific graphics processor or combination of graphics and cpu. The mid-2014 retina MacBook Pro seems to pop up frequently, here, regardless of the exact description of the symptoms.

If it's indeed a hardware-related problem, then it makes perfect sense that Apple is not going to say anything about this, because (1) there's nothing they can do about it short of telling people to get a new computer (which maybe they are gently doing), and (2) it would look bad for them and isn't critical enough to be forced to deal with publicly (a hardware problem that caused a computer to explode would get their attention).

I don't believe for an instant that Apple is unaware of the problem. First of all, there have been dozens of reports right here in this forum, and certainly many people have reported it directly to Apple. Second, it's inconceivable that Apple employees themselves have never seen the problem. I believe that they've seen it and have determined exactly what's causing it.

As I mentioned before, the "solution" to iOS devices running out of memory that was being gobbled up by "Other" is to buy another iOS device with bigger memory. Likewise, the "solution" to this problem is to buy another Mac with hardware that doesn't have the problem. Or live with it (which all of us are managing to do).

Fortunately for Apple, all of the above is merely the opinion of a person with many years' experience in high tech. There is no legal risk or obligation whatsoever for them. And, frankly, having seen plenty of stuff like this before, I'm not even annoyed at Apple. I have no desire to replace my otherwise fabulous computer (at least not right now and not for this reason). But, as I also said, it's another data point for me that leaves a less then delicious taste in my mouth. The last major data point for me was my decision not to buy another first-gen product after the first-gen Air turned out to have so many limitations. I'm planning to eventually get a 12" retina MacBook, but learned my lesson on the first Air. So Apple is driving me further from being a total fan. No problem, their stuff is still great and other companies' stuff still has just as many problems.

We had reports of this happening on completely different systems and graphics cards. From 2009 Mac Pro's, iMacs with both Nvidia and AMD cards, to 2015 Macbooks with integrated Intel Iris cards.

Thanks, that's excellent info. It does, indeed, make a specific hardware configuration much less likely.