Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

I thought so too, but had 2 freezes in an hour a couple of days ago. I had 2 or 3 youtube tabs open and safari froze.

Absolutely not solved...4 or 5 crashes in the past 24 hours here. Safari is not compatible with YouTube. Try sticking with text only sites. Uggghhhhh.

Adam F wrote:

Absolutely not solved...4 or 5 crashes in the past 24 hours here. Safari is not compatible with YouTube. Try sticking with text only sites. Uggghhhhh.

While I sympathize with the people afflicted by the issue, I don't think this ranting is helping. It is NOT a fact that Safari is somehow incompatible with youtube. I watch youtube videos almost every day.

It is a fact that there are issues in SOME machines.

Sorry Luis -

But when I / you are one of the people affected -- and the issue is NEVER really fixed -- it is difficult NOT to feel the frustration. A Very Long Time user / Apple supporter here -- but I have finally by-passed Safari and now use Chrome 98% of the time -- and guess what -- crash free no matter WHAT I am doing.

Also, while sharing personal frustrations are no necessarily helpful 'to the cause' -- neither is your exaggeration of calling it a 'rant' -- Your response is as much of a 'rant' as what Adam F wrote. I hardly call mentioning the crashes and saying 'Uggghhhh' a rant.

What would help most is Apple actually fixing this mess long-standing freezing business called Safari instead of ignoring it.

Going on for years....... and never really resolved. That, is frustration for the end user, of which I am, or was, one.

Now happily not-freezing in Chrome.

For years????

El Capitan came out September 30, 2015.

It therefore appears that you had the problem since well before that.

A problem with a long thread such as this one is that so many people have different problems and after a while they all get mixed up together and we can't know who tried what. But the title does clearly mention El Capitan.

I don't know which of the many suggested remedies or troubleshooting steps that have been recommended here you may have tried.

I would suggest installing El Capitan in a separate drive or partition, and try that for a while on such a clean install. You may try without installing Flash, to see if that is a factor, and you may try installing it and see if it makes it crash.

I've said this before: I'm nearly certain that Apple is *not* ignoring the problem, but why they haven't fixed it is open to speculation. Maybe it's an interaction with the Intel GPU in certain models, or maybe it even somehow involves a licensing issue. But I'd bet money that they know what's causing it and aren't fixing it for good reasons that we may never know. You can be pretty sure that they're not happy about the number of people who are annoyed, and have chosen a strategy that's a compromise of some sort.

If using Chrome or another browser avoids the problem, then there's even less incentive for them to fix it. I don't use Chrome (occasionally Firefox), so have no experience on that question.

The bug has been present in Yosemite as well. More than that, many people in this thread stated that they tried all the steps available and known to remedy this, to no avail. Clean install or not, separate drive or not, Flash or not – it doesn't make any difference. The bug is real and there. Please don't be dismissive when there are so many posts in this thread reporting this issue in varying conditions.

I am not being dismissive. It is clear that there are many people with the issue.

I am pointing out that there are also many people who do not have the issue, hence the notion that differential diagnostics - what is different in machines that do vs those whose who don't have it - is often the way to figure these things out.

A problem with a long thread such as this one is that so many people have different problems and after a while they all get mixed up together and we can't know who tried what.

There are past subthreads in this thread where the different problems have been categorised as best as they could be to keep mixups to a minimum. When these conversations go quiet and new commenters join the thread the mixups can start again, but the past conversations are still archived for anyone desperate enough to wade through them and see if their symptoms match any of those listed in greater detail. Another reason I mention this is that one of the identified Safari freezes that was quite widespread in this thread was also affecting some who freshly installed Yosemite. I'd hazard a suggestion that, of those affected by that particular freeze, some may not be aware that it affected them in Yosemite too due to only a short time using Safari in Yosemite before upgrading to El Capitan or else never having Yosemite installed on their machine.

Friends, I'm not seeing this issue at all (specs below). I use/watch YouTube with Safari daily, as well as browse many popular sites (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc.). No problems.

Safari 9.1.1 is pretty rock solid, hasn't given me any problems. My suspicion is Flash, an extension, or possibly a bad frameworks file.

Have a look here: If Safari is slow, stops responding, quits unexpectedly, or has other issues - Apple Support

Reinstalling OS X (non-destructive) will replace any frameworks that may be compromised or damaged.

15” MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)

2.5 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

1TB PCIe SSD

Integrated GPU: Intel Iris Pro

Discrete GPU: AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB

Mac OS X 10.11.5 “El Capitan”

Luis, I do believe Safari and YouTube don't play well, and I'm not talking about the freezes - lag, big frame loss and poor performance sometime. Sometimes you get away with it, sometimes you encounter problems, but those other issues I've mentioned are there.

For me it's only been Safari and YouTube, nothing else. Lately I used graphic intensive apps and games with buttery smooth performance. I even tested my GPU and there were no issues (someone suggested a dying GPU). Apart from YouTube, no issues with Safari, whether it was text, flash players and so on, this being the main reason I'm not ready to give up on it yet. As the official statements said, keeping a clean Safari (website data and history) helps a lot, in my case also reducing the number of freezes.

I would also like to add that the ranting does not help. This reminds me of the wifi issue some time ago with Yosemite, when people said the exact same thing: my expensive machine has a problem, Apple needs to fix it. And they said they did, which lead to a minority of users still experiencing problems - but because of their network setup. My point is that sometimes you have to evaluate some of the problems yourself and the fact that there are other people that use the same machines just fine should be food for thought.

You guys may not agree with me (which is fine), but one browser with youtube issues is not a big problem and does not mean that Apple computers & software are bad. I still haven't seen reports about SMC reset or running a clean Safari for a longer interval from some of the users complaining. I do hope the problems stop and the people get along just fine with their machines.

Hello

I'm not a Macbook specialist but all I can say is that get another web browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox, etc. There are many but the one I refer you to use is Google Chrome.

I'm avoiding using another browsers as my RAM is limited (4GB).

My everyday machine is an MBP 2009 that has only 4 GB RAM and El Capitan. I'm trying not to have another apps open to conserve the memory. After updating to 10.11.5, then clearing SMC and removing all my History, my Safari was very responsive and I have posted my observations here. However, since the latest update, the system is losing the steam: page openings are slower and slower regardless of the time of a day. I can't fathom why.

I also have an older MacBook with Lion on it and 4 GB RAM as well. I opened it today, cleared the Safari history and played a little with different sites opening them thru bookmarks.

On both machines I use Safari and have never added any extentions to it. That applies to Firefox and Chrome as well.

Well, with both machines on and standing side by side, it became obvious that MacBook with Lion is now more responsive than MBP with El Capitan.

Mind you, I have never had forced restarts, freezes, or YouTube reported problems with El Capitan. Rarely I have to switch to Chrome when YouTube response on Safari becomes too slow, but it proves to be either slow as well or sligtly faster only.

Luís, I know I haven't described my troubleshooting process, but I could do without the condescension, thank you very much. Honestly, do you think a user who is willing (albeit bregudgingly) to Jailbreak his iPhone doesn't know not to use pre-release (nay, developer-bound) software in a professional environment? Of course I will do so from an external drive, when I am on vacation, and hammer Safari 10 Beta until I feel confident it doesn't crash my machine anymore (actually, now that I think of it, I may try the Safari 10 Beta for El Capitan instead, as that would be the best of both worlds). But thanks for the warning, anyway.

For the record, my Mac was freezing with the then-current, stable release of Safari a few months ago, and I was already giving Safari Technology Preview a try back then, to no avail. I was, indeed, running El Capitan installed over an original Yosemite installation, so I did what any sensible Mac user would do in those circumstances: I erased and installed El Capitan, and manually copied all my data, forgoing any Time Machine and Migration Assistant shenanigans, just to be sure. And I used only plain Safari at first, just to give it yet another opportunity.

Lo and below, the ****** browser started freezing my Mac again after a while… It was only then when I went back to Safari Technology Preview, because what the heck. Nope, didn't work out either. I ended up using the memory sinkhole that Chrome has become, but still managed to have a stabler system; I'd rather deal with memory leaks than with irrecoverable crashes.

What does that have to do with wanting to JB my iPhone? Does iCloud bookmark and tab syncing ring a bell? Do you know Opera, when logged in with an Opera account, does that, too (so does Chrome, but I value my privacy as well)? If I could only set it as my default browser on the iPhone, I would get a functional equivalent to Safari. So I believe this is very much on topic…

Anyway, I'm not mad at you, but I am surely mad at Apple. This is an ooooold bug… And so is the bug (or database corruption, which will force me to reset playcounts and ratings *and* rebuild ALL my smart playlists from scratch) that prevents my iTunes Library from syncing properly (if at all) with my iPhone. Yes, I know it's a bit off-topic, but I am mad, and rightly so.

– João

[happily posted in Opera, btw]

I'm not sure if I am adding my comment in the correct place, but I too have been having random shutdowns and re-starts, but not just when using Safari.

I have a iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) and only just started having problems after the 10.11.4 update, the 10.11.5 update did not solve any problems, and in fact this is now happening 3 or 4 times a day. I could be using Safari as in a couple of minutes ago when I was trying to write this post and the computer froze and shutdown, or it could be completely idle with no apps open and I will come to use it and it will be dead. It also seems now to be dead every morning, even though I never shut it down, So definitely random. I must say that I am finding this so frustrating now, and was hoping for some sort of fix - how long do you wait? A £1500 brand new computer that is totally unreliable!