Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

Today I have freeze when deleting video in Photos.app. I have 10.11.5 😢

BACK TO FREEZES here too! After all this time. I had posted last on May 20th that I hadn't seen freezes in a while.

Today...quit iMovie...closed a Safari window that was on YouTube and CrAsH!!!!

I just deleted all website data as I had done about a month ago to see if that alleged workaround actually holds...until the next crash.

Pathetic. Maybe we can get a new version of Internet Explorer.

@Adam F.

Sorry to hear. I think it was mentioned a good while back but if anyone with the HTML5 video tab close/switch issue truly wants to truly test for interference of stored site data they can set preferences to block cookies and data while running Safari in private mode. Personally, I don't think there's any weight to the idea - I didn't see any sound argument for it originally beyond it being coincidental. I had freezes on a clean install of El Capitan while it was running in private mode.

Unrelated, but I'm now on 10.11.5. I haven't had time with the laptop that wasn't work-critical to try and crash it with Safari TP so I'm still on Chrome until I get a chance.

I'd like to offer a small point, which seems rather obvious, and which surely doesn't apply to many (most) people here, but which I observed can make you think you've got a freeze when, in fact, you don't: there are circumstances when, for reasons I haven't yet fully analyzed, a bluetooth mouse (and possibly keyboard) will stop communicating correctly with your mac. If you use bluetooth HIDs (human interface devices), before assuming that your system is frozen, try power cycling the mouse (and/or keyboard). The strangest thing about this particular glitch is that the mouse cursor continues to track your hand movement, but the buttons don't work, so you don't suspect that it's a bluetooth connectivity problem. This has happened to me more than once, and it can look identical to the freezes being reported here (occurring, for example, after watching youtube video, etc.) - the system appears unresponsive, and may or may not respond sporadically after that.

If any of you can test this, I'd be real interested to hear if this has happened to you.

There are lots of these. If you have an external hard drive USB connected that sleeps, anything accessing the file system ( beyond recent cache) will cause the beachball wile it wakes up. Its a trade off for longevity and low power consumption. I suspect there are quite a few more. Typically we are talking about 5-20 seconds though, and other operations shoudl continue...

Guys!

Please try this video (sfw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqxbbiuqvag and tell if you have strange bright artifacts on white part of the video while in FULLSCREEN mode (not occurring in smaller player size).

I've just noticed it on my girlfriend's rMPB - she's using stock safari and is on 10.11.5 but she's NOT having youtube closing tab issue.

Anyway, the problem has been described on f.lux app forums and people have realized it is not the app issue but mac video driver (intel?) problem.

For me - as I'm using html5 converting plugin for Safari the problem of artifacts does not occur. (CORRECTION - artifacts are visible when video scrolling bar disappears!!!) photo here - notice the strange squares on white field (much brighter than other parts):

It also does not occur on opera (which has some drivers built in I believe, as it plays videos that require Silverlight plugin in other browsers without it).

My theory is: Apple has updated the intel video driver with ElCapitan (Yosemite must have had older version of the driver as our closing tab issue does not exist on Y.) and the driver is totally screwed up. Don't know if we need to blame Apple or Intel.

Correct me if I'm wrong but that's the only explanation I can find for that.

I'm sorry to have to say this, but this issue is also present on Yosemite. Though most of the time it's not as horrible as it is on El Capitan, meaning that it does not happen as often and that it only lasts for a couple of seconds and then everything is back to normal again, no need to restart OS X or even Safari.

I truly hope this is not a hardware issue, though if it's a software issue and they're not going to address it (they've been ignoring it for quite a long time), it's really all the same to me.

@xgrep

I have the intermittent bluetooth mouse connection problems that I've seen documented in a lot of places. If my mouse cursor stops moving I've pretty much got an automatic reflex to reach for the trackpad for the 5 or so seconds that bluetooth glitches out. The bluetooth mouse was only added a few months into my freezing problem that was already well underway.

@villovsky

I don't why the artefacts in the video are so severely present but I can confirm that the strange squares, to a lesser degree, are definitely part of the video and an expected result of the video compression... just, they just shouldn't be so contrasted or pronounced as they are in your picture. They're very apparent if I change the gamma of the video to exaggerate it but I can't see them if I watch the video normally in fullscreen in Chrome. Perhaps the f.lux aspect is relevant to this as it alters the colour space and gamma of the screen. Regarding Yosemite, see rottencabages message. I had the GUI freeze occur in Yosemite also.

@palegreenghosts

The situation I was describing was slightly different: the cursor would move just fine, leading you to think that there's nothing wrong with the mouse. But the buttons wouldn't do anything, and, with nothing else moving on the display, you could think that you had a graphic freeze. At least twice when this happened, I thought I was in a freeze, but restarting the mouse cleared it.

@xgrep

Apologies, I misunderstood. That's pretty interesting. I think I can still rule this out in my own situation as, like I mentioned, I was having this problem quite a while before I started using a Bluetooth mouse. Secondly (and most pertinently), the GUI freezing is most evident on my screen by the time display in the top right corner displaying no change until the freeze stops. The system time does continue being kept, as evident by any logs that are checked afterwards, but the displayed time is frozen.

I'm not using any wireless peripherals. Wireless is a red herring for Safari/YouTube issue.

Just a note for anyone experimenting with Safari Technology Preview - I found it using 55GB today and about 16GB yesterday.

"Safari Technology Preview - I found it using 55GB today and about 16GB yesterday."

Wow - that's a problem. Idle, with about 9 windows open, min is using 416 megabytes. that's 0.416 GB

late 2011 MBP i7

G

@Adam F

My point was to help people to recognize when they might not be experiencing the true freeze that's being discussed in this thread even though it may appear that's what's happening. I think I mentioned that the bluetooth mouse issue that looks like this freeze would surely not apply to many people on this thread (obviously including people who are not using a bluetooth mouse). You might've missed that part if you read it too quickly.

It's not a "red herring" if you think you've got the freeze, but it turns out to be something unrelated that's easy to fix.

@xgrep

No intention to offend you. I was just trying to keep this thread on track. Over the last 32 pages, there have been a bunch of times when an issue unrelated to the issue in this thread has been raised or suggested. A couple of us have gone back into recaps of the specific details involving the Safari/YouTube crashes at issue here so that we can stay on track. I'm just trying to cut to the chase and stay on track quickly.

I can confirm that 10.11.5 does NOT fix the issue. We're just going to have to live with it I guess.

Successful workarounds include:

• Not using Safari
• Not using YouTube
• Not using OS X El Capitan
• Not using the computer