Our Safari has been freezing up and often stopping. Apple Support has been helpful, and even recommended that we upgrade to El Capitan. We did and we're still getting the "rolling ball" and Safari freezing. We've tried multiple solutions.
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)
Open Activity Monitor to the CPU tab and move it to a place where it is visible. Make sure under View that All Processes is selected. When yo have Safari problem look and see what is using a lot of CPU.
also
Run this and post the results here so we know more about your configuration.
Might be a corrupt .plist.
Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.
Quit the application.
Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library/com.apple.Safari.plist. Then go to Preferences. Move the .plist to your desktop.
Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.
If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.
Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.
Thank you, Eric, for your suggestion. I have followed the procedure you have outlined and all seems to be working well.
I actually went to Go, then ~/Library/Safari/, to get to the bookmarks.plist, which I backed up onto a flash drive.
My next question is this: does the bookmarks.plist rebuild itself?
I have experimented throughout the day with viewing various webpages and I haven't gotten the rolling beach ball. I'm optimistic that your solution will work!
Here are the stats from the Activity Monitor at 5:32 MST
% CPU = 0.7
CPU time = 6.82
Threads = 12
Idle Wake Ups = 1
PID = 687
I hope that this is what you were seeking.
When you restarted and reopened Safari, the .plist should have been recreated.
I thought that I had it made. Unfortunately, the rolling beach ball returned and some newspaper websites are freezing up this morning. I cleared history, cache and all other website data and restarted. We'll see how the day progresses. It would be strange if I had to clear history and cache everyday just to get Safari to work. Firefox and Chrome do not have this problem – I prefer using Safari, but perhaps I'll be forced to use the other two.
Safari seems to be working well today (Dec 27th). No rolling beach ball after about 2-hours of browsing through on-line newspapers and the like. So far, so good, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Thank you for your suggestions.
You are welcome.
The rolling beach ball returned with a vengeance these past few days when I read on-line newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, NY Times, Washington Post and host of on-line magazines such as Harper's, Reason, etc. This has been going on for the past four days.
The rolling beach ball and Safari freezing does not occur when I engage in on-line financial stuff or even writing on this discussion board. This seems unique to the on-line newspapers.
The rolling beach ball does not occur on my iPad, nor does it occur on my 5-year old Mac Book Pro running system 10.6.8
Therefore, I am resorting to using Chrome and Firefox for my on-line newspapers. I've tried all of the ideas that have been suggested and I am grateful for that help. But I am frustrated that the rolling beach ball continues to return and return and return.
AARRGGHH! I look forward to further suggestions. I am using El Capitan 10.11.2 on an MacBook Pro Retina display.
Safari/Preferences/Advanced - enable the Develop menu, then go there and Empty Caches. Quit/reopen Safari and test. Then try Safari/History/Show History and delete all history items. Quit/reopen Safari and test. You can also try try Safari/Clear History…. The down side is it clears all cookies.Doing this may cause some sites to no longer recognize your computer as one that has visited the web site. Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J. When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder. Select Library./Caches/com.apple.Safari/Caches.db and move it to the trash.
Go to Safari Preferences/Extensions and turn all extensions off. Test. If okay, turn the extensions on one by one until you figure out what extension is causing the problem.
Safari Corruption See post by Linc Davis
I have the same problem with every scrolling news site that I use. (I'm using the lastest version of Yosemite). It will load the site and then when I start to scroll down, it freezes (beachball and no hotlinks accessible). I have to reboot Safari which does nothing to solve the problem. Apple Support on the web mentions checking extensions. I have no extensions, so that's not the issue. It also mentions removing any internet plug-ins by accessing the User Library/Internet Plug-Ins folder. I had two. I removed each one at a time and then tried Safari. That made no difference. Frankly, I'm astonished that Safari is so buggy. I just downloaded the 9.0.3 version and that changed nothing. Real junk software programming. I'm using Firefox without any issue. There's a possibility that there is no user fix possible and it requires Apple engineers to intervene. If that's the case then it's critical to contact Apple tech support and establish a case file so that our "voice" will be heard. Thanks to those posting here who are trying to help.
What is yo use another browser like Chrome or FireFox?
If you open Activity Monitor to CPU and make sure that in View All Processes is checked and place it to the side when you can view it while suing Safari what is using a lot of CPU when you have the problem?
I just cleared the Safari cache. Zero effect on the scrolling issue.
I've just spent the last 1 hour or so with a superb technician with Apple. We went over many possible issues with Safari and finally found the answer. The problem is with the Adobe Flash Player. The only solution is to remove the Flash Player. It's structurally incompatible with Safari which will require an Adobe/Apple chat to resolve. Updating the Flash Player doesn't change anything. The flash player plugin is accessbile in the main Library folder (not the User Library folder) under Internet Plugins. You can drag it to the trash, restart Safari and the newspaper content pages should work. Obviously if you have any other sites that use Flash, you'll have a problem with that. I WOULD STRONGLY ADVISE EVERYONE WITH THE ISSUE TO CALL APPLE AND SET UP A CASE FILE! Sorry about the upper case emphasis, but as my technician said, the more case files dealing with a specific problem, the more likely that it will be pushed to higher level priority. There have to be many users experiencing this problem, so get on the phone to Apple, please! If you want to maintain the Flash Player on Safari, I would suggest you use Firefox or Chrome for your newspaper browser. I hope this helps.
Well I tried this suggestion and moved the Flash plugin out of the Internet Plugin folder and restarted Safari and I still have the spinning beachball when scrolling a large site. So this did not work for me. I moved the plugin to a folder on the desktop.
Safari freezes - rolling beach ball
