Safari keeps crashing/freezing after install of El Capitan

I visited the local Apple Store and referenced this forum regarding El Capitan; some nice young man alluded to buying new Apple products (asa solution); evidently, El Capitan doesn't malfunction on newly purchased Apple equipment? I hope this was the folly of youth speaking rather than a corporate philosophy!

OH - there's some fine advice. My mid-2014 rMBP is just too old and frail to handle Safari on El Capitan.

I'm not sure if you spoke with an employee, but I wouldn't be surprised. I've gotten more wrong answers from the employees at Apple Stores than on forums. That would be from the employees who aren't too busy doing personal texts, playing video games on the demo machines, or hunting down cute girls in the store. The atmosphere really has changed over the years. [/end tangent]

LOOOL thats exactly what Apple wants us to do. I have a feeling that with every new OS they create some problems on purpose for older maschines so you need to buy a new ones. And new Macbooks are coming so Im not surprised... Their strategy for years.

With that being said, my Macbook is not even old, bought in early 2014 but still doesnt perform on El Cap... If I didnt do the upgrade would never have a problem. And yet with every new OS update they say its faster bla bla BS.

Fact check. I'm running 10.11.1 on 2009 and 2011 laptops, both with 8G ram. It is a bit faster than Yosemite, not as fast, IMO, as 10.6.8

(the most stable i have experienced and whcih i still run on my "sever")

But never upgrade until you have checked compatibility with all your apps, and have a bootable backup.

Adam, you are correct. I spoke to an Apple employee (afraid he might get fired)....most of the wonderful employees have been "replaced" by do-nothing people; yes, they are busy playing games, texting and talking to their friends.

It saddens me to see a once great product fall so far. My MacBook Air is 2014 and I won't upgrade to El Capitan. The one-to-one service is now, non-renewable. I asked why? I didn't receive a good answer.

My experience with phone support and genius support was naive; Many contradictions, different and opposing solutions. Apparently, the "best" solution is to buy a new product? I sat next to a lovely man with a 2009 MacBook Pro. His computer was so sluggish...no one could help him. He left disheartened. I was there for over 2 hours and I didn't like what I observed.

Just to add weight to the issue, this is happening to me also on (also from 2014) rMBP since I got it with Yosemite. I've been onto Apple Support about this and they don't acknowledge it as an issue they may know about, just to try the various generic trouble-shooting issues such as resetting SMC and NVRAM, etc. This was a bit disheartening to hear as, from reading of many others having the same issue, I felt the problem was more specific and must have been flagged to Apple many times by now from those of us who have contacted them. I rely so much on my laptop for daily work that it's not a simple task for me to find the time or not worry about wiping and install it from scratch when I don't have much hope in it resolving the issue (from reading others' experiences of the same issue). It feels like I've to jump through lots of unnecessary hoops that are disrupting work and I bought the laptop recently in good faith.

If anyone's interested in the specifics of my issue:

When watching HTML5 videos in Safari the system will randomly freeze. For me this is triggered 90% of the time by closing or switching from a YouTube tab to another. If it freezes when I close the tab it will quite often do so during the animation of enlarging the other tabs to occupy the space left by the closing tab. In this case, if I wait about 2 minutes, it will unfreeze.

However, if I switch tabs and it freezes, it rarely unfreezes. Most of the system is unresponsive. The time in upper right corner remains stuck, no keyboard commands or mouse clicks work. I can't force quit anything, open menus, swipe, or do anything other than a hard reset. Interestingly, my mouse cursor will still move, whether from the trackpad, USB of Bluetooth mouse. Music that was playing will continue to play. I believe that tasks already running (such as rendering video) continue to do so. So it feels like it's the UI that's frozen and most background tasks will continue. I can't actually access any background tasks so it still results in a hard reset. I dread hard resetting as I feel I'm risking data loss the more times I do it.

10.11.2 has not fixed this problem. It's also introduced another. I can no longer maximise YouTube videos. The screen darkens, the controls move to the bottom but neither the picture or the controls expand to fill the screen. I can shrink them again and full-screen them again with the same issue. It has also caused my system to freeze after switching to another tab.

As I've read about lots of variations of this HTML5 video freeze and not seen it addressed by Apple in remedies or in the 10.11.2 bug fix, I'm now worried it's a hardware issue affecting a number of their devices.

I was an advocate of updates to all my Apple devices. I purchased an iPhone 5S two years ago. It took the genius bar 6 months to replace it (yes, I had Apple Care)....the constant IOS updates to all my devices have left me uncertain on updates. El Capitan, and IOS 9 (something) have left me afraid. My Apple devices currently work. El Capitan has horrible reviews. My last IOS update gave me a lot of grief. I'm reluctant to upgrade. My iPad 2 (yes, old) took a great deal of time to update the third party developers. What failed to update was the Apple Store App! Imagine?

I spent nearly three hours at the local Apple Genius bar. None of the old employees were there. I talked to three "genius'" with different opinions. I wanted to convert AAC music files to MP3. I left disheartened. One young guy was more interested in showing off his keyboard skills.

I am very discouraged.

Make a copy of your music file . I just do it in the finder, the old fashioned way.

Then open the copy in itunes, right click and there is an option to make an AAC version from MP3s and presumably an MP3 from AAC.

El Cap is imperfect, but i overall prefer it to previous.

G

Although a very helpful reply Grant, perhaps the conversation on music files is best left to a separate message? It's understandably easy to go off on a tangent but it can weaken the usefulness of a discussion if the topic derails. It sounds like there's several issues affecting Jane that she should certainly start threads about or raise with support.

Perhaps I'm a little bit gung-ho with jumping in with this but I've seen too many useful conversations frustratingly pitter out into nothing from similar diversions. Apologies for any offence - none intended.

@palegreenghosts

It sounds like you're having EXACTLY the same experience that I am. What Mac are you on?

I HOPE you're wrong about it being a hardware issue! Since it ONLY happens in Safari, I think it's crappy coding.

I just had Safari destroy the system to the point where there was no recovery and slow operation. I heard stuff happening in the background (Internet functions running - USB ports active) - but NO WAY to do ANYTHING because of Safari just hanging. I restarted after about 4 minutes of waiting.

It seems that the problem often happens when CLOSING a YouTube window. I think it is, as mentioned, related to HTML5 video.

It's very aggravating that Apple has let this slide for MONTHS. Safari might as well be considered deprecated for now.

FWIW - Here's the what Console showed while I sat watching my 1 year old machine just be able to do NOTHING.

12/15/15 9:50:00.099 AM Safari[326]: tcp_connection_tls_session_error_callback_imp 9777 __tcp_connection_tls_session_callback_write_block_invoke.434 error 22

12/15/15 9:50:02.452 AM Safari[326]: ERROR: History: Failed to insert item into the history_items table: database disk image is malformed (11)

12/15/15 9:50:02.452 AM Safari[326]: ERROR: History: Failed to insert item into the history_items table: database disk image is malformed (11)

12/15/15 9:50:10.433 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:50:15.988 AM com.apple.CDScheduler[313]: Thermal pressure state: 2 Memory pressure state: 0

12/15/15 9:50:15.988 AM com.apple.CDScheduler[45]: Thermal pressure state: 2 Memory pressure state: 0

12/15/15 9:50:26.255 AM spindump[589]: Saved userspace_watchdog_timeout.spin report for WindowServer version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2015-12-15-095026_*******.userspac e_watchdog_timeout.spin

12/15/15 9:50:26.351 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(__wd_service_report_unresponsive_block_invoke) - spindump gathered for (com.apple.WindowServer) at (/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2015-12-15-095026_*******-2.users pace_watchdog_timeout.spin)

12/15/15 9:50:35.565 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:50:42.044 AM spindump[589]: Saved userspace_watchdog_timeout.spin report for WindowServer version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2015-12-15-095042_*******.userspac e_watchdog_timeout.spin

12/15/15 9:50:42.047 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(__wd_service_report_unresponsive_block_invoke) - spindump gathered for (com.apple.WindowServer) at (/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2015-12-15-095042_*******o-2.user space_watchdog_timeout.spin)

12/15/15 9:50:42.050 AM mds[63]: (Volume.Normal:166) vsd:0x7fc88b18e000 DisabledStore recycle:19 context:{

DisabledRecycleCount = 19;

}

12/15/15 9:50:42.073 AM mds[63]: (Volume.Error:577) vsd:0x7fc888821800 Open failed. failureCount:19 {

DisabledRecycleCount = 19;

}

12/15/15 9:51:00.705 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:51:07.399 AM spindump[589]: Saved userspace_watchdog_timeout.spin report for WindowServer version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2015-12-15-095107_*******.userspac e_watchdog_timeout.spin

12/15/15 9:51:07.402 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(__wd_service_report_unresponsive_block_invoke) - spindump gathered for (com.apple.WindowServer) at (/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2015-12-15-095107_*******-2.users pace_watchdog_timeout.spin)

12/15/15 9:51:25.843 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:51:46.135 AM com.apple.CDScheduler[313]: Thermal pressure state: 1 Memory pressure state: 0

12/15/15 9:51:46.135 AM com.apple.CDScheduler[45]: Thermal pressure state: 1 Memory pressure state: 0

12/15/15 9:51:50.988 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:52:16.126 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:52:41.271 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:53:06.417 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

12/15/15 9:53:31.553 AM watchdogd[299]: [watchdog_daemon] @(_wd_daemon_service_thread) - service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive

What Mac are you on?

I'm on a mid-2014 rMBP 15". You're likely also using one released during 2014?

My concerns about it being hardware related are only due to this issue being mostly isolated to 2014 MBPs and such a serious consequence (regular system freezing) has gone unfixed by Apple over many OSX updates since Yosemite for these models. If it was only Safari behaving badly I would have thought a fix would have been issued by now. But this, of course, is not conclusive. I hope I'm wrong.

YES...I'm on the SAME model.

Are you finding the issue outside of Safari? I've only seen the problem on Safari and with YouTube. Others mentioned Vimeo. I don't think I use it enough to know. I don't see it on Chrome (and haven't checked to see if Chrome uses its built-in Flash on YouTube).

I had other threads on this issue deleted by Apple. It happened two times.

If this one gets deleted, I'll go to another forum or create a website related to the issue. It needs to be handled...whether via software or recall.

It's a productivity issue for me as well.

Adam F and crowd:

I propose a nice, scientific experient to figure out what is going on, or at least provide a lot of input.

one of you needs to step forward to volunteer and do the following:

1. Make a complete, boot-able clone of your existing Lapotop to an external hard drive. presume that you will clone it back within 24 hours and therefore it must be complete and up to date.

2. Format your internal drive and perform a a clean install of El Cap. Do not move over your old 3rd party software or configuration files. They may be corrupt, or one may be a problem - that's the point.

3. Test safari

4. report back.

This will tell you that either a) a clean install with no 3rd party software works fine, or b) it does not.

If it does work OK, we can then focus on whether your upgrade is corrupt or some 3rd party software is to blame.

If it does not work, OK, you have proven that there is a problem with El Cap and your model.

All this talk is nothing but useless speculation, and easily proven right or wrong.

Grant

Thank you for your suggestions, Grant. I *think* I mentioned it somewhere in this thread, but I did do a clean install.

I recently sold my Mac Pro and moved to this mid-2014 rmbp as my main machine. So, I wiped the drive and installed a fresh copy of El Capitan. I didn't import my settings (wanted a completely fresh system). I think I had this issue with Safari under Yosemite, but don't recall it being that extensive or frequent. It never happened on the Mac Pro (2008), but I wasn't on El Capitan.

I think we have conclusive proof that the problem is with SAFARI, but I'm not sure I can say El Capitan since the problem shows up ONLY when I'm dealing with SAFARI (and for me...only with YouTube - which is using HTML 5 video).

I propose a nice, scientific experient to figure out what is going on, or at least provide a lot of input.

one of you needs to step forward to volunteer and do the following:

Thanks for the input Grant. While I'm not in a position in the next while to perform this test (this is my sole work machine) I might be able to assist with detective work by adding that I was getting freezes in Safari and Chrome before installing any third party software or extensions - within days of purchase.

I can appreciate that diagnostics need to be thorough and keep things objective. While I'm not recommending they be omitted, I have researched and experienced this issue for long enough to see that there are too many scenarios with those who have a 2014 models and have this issue for us all to coincidentally have an issue with 3rd party software. I have to find the moment between jobs to wipe my laptop and clean install to present a final diagnostic to Apple. I am doing so with little hope of it solving the issue (as it was there from a fresh purchase and too many other customers have the issue with the same model) and wish they had made some mention of being aware of an issue and working on it, or needing to recall the product. To be honest, my year warranty is coming near its end and I'm worried this won't have been solved by then and I'll be told I've no options despite the product having this issue from the start and me having reported it already.

From reading stories in the past of other widespread (but different) defects where the solution was to perform generic diagnostics, the next generic step seemed to be to replace the logic board. Since it was the same model part, the problem persisted. That sounds like a lot of time down the drain that I cannot afford for my business. It's disheartening giving something in for repair with a bad feeling it's not going to fix it.