Safari freezes when visiting certain websites.

No, you won't get any acknowledgement from Apple. But at least it's a means of telling them. There are other methods of contacting them more directly, including free phone contact, and for that you need to look at the options at the bottom of http://www.apple.com/support/, including at extreme bottom-right. Another thought is that you could complain also at a local highstreet Apple Store, if one's conveniently to hand. The harder and more widely we press Apple, expressing our deep dissatisfaction with the situation, the more likely Apple will sit up and start to take notice.

You mention the spinning beachball. The appearance of that is indeed symptomatic of this issue with Safari. Until I discovered a workaround some weeks ago, Safari would freeze whenever I visited the UK Amazon site, and the beachball would then appear. It'd never happen with any other website I used. My mouse pointer immediately became ineffective, except for some limited movement of it. I found that if I moved the pointer out of the website's window I was then able to do a Quit or to move backward to a previous and different website and then continue. But I think the ability to do this probably depends on the individual circumstances. I've gathered that this freezing has happened with pretty much all the Amazon sites around the world. Also, some other large websites, such as that of the New York Times, exhibit this behaviour as well.

Use of Activity Monitor, one of the utilities built into OSX (see Applications > Utilities), has always flagged a 'website error' when this freezing has occurred, at the same time showing that CPU activity goes up to virtually 100%. It's clearly an issue that involves both Safari and certain websites, and it's my contention that the websites of Amazon and the like now fail in compatibility terms because changes were made some months ago in the Javascript that they use (that's Javascript, not Java), so that now the website hyperlinks and other functions no longer respond properly to the browser. Incidentally, this issue seems to be affecting all other browsers (despite some claims to the contrary), as well as being common to Yosemite, Mavericks and El Capitan. Curiously though, one or two respondents say that they don't experience the problem at all. Eric Root, for example, says he's not met the problem. The 64-dollar question is Why? What's he been doing that we haven't? Is it just that he hasn't exercised the Amazon site sufficiently? After all, the problem at that site comes and goes; sometimes you can spend some hours there and not meet it at all, but in other sessions the freezing will happen within a minute or two.

The workaround that I discovered was to reconfigure Safari to use a smaller fontsize. This was, and is, dead simple to do. It's stopped the freezing and the beachballing, though just occasionally the beachball will appear for half-a-second (with no consequence) when I'm moving from being online to offline. This workaround has worked for many others too, I've gathered, though I suspect it might be confined to specific Macs, such as iMacs. Always worth a try, though. It could be, for instance, that certain website developers took a decision some months ago to cut down the number of compatible fontsizes, perhaps as a measure in slimming down website performance to conform more to iOS devices. Who knows?

One particular theory banded about by others is that some websites are now employing IPv6 and that therefore users who continue to use IPv4 will inevitably find that their browser will then either not open the website at all, or will display only a limited amount of the webpage. Personally, I've not tested for this, for the simple reason that my ISP tells me that they do not, as yet, support IPv6. In any event, these symptoms can just as easily be the result of some corruption of website data on the individual's machine (history, cookies, cache, etc), which could be corrected by just clearing them out.

Finally, there's the question of Flash Player. Is it necessary? Should it be used on any Mac these days? Could it be interfering with the operation of Safari in some detrimental way? Well, it's classed as a 'plug-in' and is most certainly still required at many websites, one or two of which I regularly use. And despite all the bad press that Flash has received in recent years about holes in its security, I found that the latest iMac on demo in my local Apple Store most definitely was using it, so I can only summise that Apple regards the presence of Flash on its Macs as perfectly valid, provided it's kept up to date.

The workaround that I discovered was to reconfigure Safari to use a smaller fontsize.

I'm not clear how to try this suggestion -- on my version of Safari, Advanced tab has an Accessibility checkbox option "Never use font sizes smaller than XX"... is this the option being referenced to? I set it to 12 to try out, but it has not prevented Safari from hanging.

Also note, soon as I posted the prior message above, Safari froze on this Apple Support website -- as I mention above, I am seeing no pattern with this issue -- certainly not limited to Amazon or sites with high graphic content.

........ and?

Yes, I was referring to "Never use font sizes smaller than ...".

As it happens, I've been posting about Safari and its recent issues on a different Apple forum, and it might be of some interest that a fellow Safari sufferer (WWimac2015) has today 'achieved a result' by disconnecting and then rebooting the wi-fi, though quite what he/she means by that I'm not sure. It might not apply in your case but, again, might be worth a try. He/she managed to get an Apple techie to phone him/her. Only time and further browsing will tell whether it's proved to be a real solution for him/her. Have a look at "Is OSX/Safari update (21st March 2016) a help or a hazard?". Scroll right down to the latest submissions.

I have the same problem and it is becoming ridiculous: I am force-quitting the browser several times a day.

Safari - Version 9.1 (10601.5.17.4)

Yosemite

pda-uk wrote:

I have the same problem and it is becoming ridiculous: I am force-quitting the browser several times a day.

Safari - Version 9.1 (10601.5.17.4)

Yosemite

Force quitting is better than the power button reset that I am doing every few hours. How are able to force quit your browser?

And sorry to hear you are having this problem.

I keep the 'Force Quit Applications' window open on the desktop at all times at the moment.

Safari really is now unusable. I'm getting a hang almost everytime I use it.

Will be using Opera for a while, until Apple sorts this out. Very annoying as I only came back to Safari about a year ago, when I found Firefox hung all the time after an update. Running out of browsers.

Can anyone make a browser that doesn't hang when it goes near javascript, Flash etc etc?

Have you complained to Apple themselves about it? Unless you've already done so, leave details about your machine and its Safari troubles at http://www.apple.com/feedback. You can also find other ways of contacting Apple, including a free phoneback service, at the bottom of the webpage at http://www.apple.com/support, including the Contact Us link. Simply discussing the problem in this or another Community forum isn't going to make it come to their attention. I mean, that's fine as far as it goes, but with such a widespread issue as this one with Safari at present, those developers at Apple need to be woken up to the position a great many of us are finding ourselves in now.

I must say that in all my years of Internet computing I've never come across a situation with a browser quite as bad as this one. Although it can manifest itself in some slightly different ways on various different Macs, all the evidence points to a major mismatch of Safari with Javascript. This started in earnest (in 2015 there were earlier signs of a bug in Safari that never got properly addressed) with the February update.

Just been through a spate of iMac restarts in the last 30 minutes driving me nuts - clearly all related to safari as not much else open and every time it was while using safari.

This has been going on now for the past few weeks - sometimes I have a break and go a few days without anything happening even while using safari - but after reading this post and seeing someone flag the issue of selecting 'don't use fonts less then 12ppt' that got my attention as I think I can trace my issues back to the day I selected that a few weeks ago.

Ironically it was while checking out a new iMac that I noticed the fonts were bigger and I found an option to increase the font size - something I have since been unable to locate on my iMac and have therefore putnit down to hardware differences.

All I could find was this option in safari so thought I would select it and give it a go - which has caused me no end of trouble it turns out.

Anyway after the fifth hard turn off and restart I have de-selected the option and run safari for a bit without any issues. I have also de-selected the safari suggestions but I don't think it is that as I had further freezes after deselecting that.

Will keep fingers crossed for this solution / work around to be heavily tried but seems to be an issue with software and font sizes by the looks of things.

The only other thing of note that I seemed to notice was each time safari froze (am calling it that because people have been calling safari closing down unexpectedly as 'crashing' and that has not been my experience) there was a voice icon on the path bar to the right indicating that a video or at least audio was playing on the page but never was anything playing - not sure what that means if anything.

TheRegulator and others,

Have you tried putting your Mac temporarily into Safe Mode? There's a possibility that it could improve your current situation. In Safe Mode only the essential elements of OSX are automatically loaded and run, and OSX then checks everything out and corrects any anomalies it finds. Safe Mode normally takes less than 5 mins to run. Worth a try, I'd say.

Here's what to do:

1. Restart the Mac by clicking Apple icon > Restart.

2. Place your finger over the Shift key (not on it) and as soon as you hear the 'tah-dah' sound, depress the Shift key and hold it down.

3. Release the key when you see the Apple logo in the middle of the screen.

4. The screen should then remain essentially blank. Let OSX then do its thing in the background. It may find and correct various errors. The process could take a few minutes, so be patient and don't use the mouse or keyboard or whatever in that time.

5. OSX should finally bring you out to the Desktop again.

6. To leave Safe Mode, just restart the Mac in the normal way without pressing any keys.

As I've said so often in a number of these forums, I'm of the view that most of Safari's current woes are caused by a mismatch of it with Javascript, the software used by websites that determines the layout of webpages when used with a browser. I'm personally convinced that Javascript developers have made fundamental changes in recent months that have been designed, at the expense of laptops and desktop machines, to cater more for iOS-run devices. Some of these changes may well include new restrictions on font types and sizes.

When Safari 'bombs out' and you then subsequently look in the System Log you invariably find that a 'webpage error' (or words to that effect) has occurred. In fact, it's very interesting what the 9.1 update to Safari states (I usually do my updates manually and so can read what Apple says they're modifying before I allow the download). It states that one of the modifications to Safari is an 'updated version of WebKit, with enhanced support for images and CSS' - which therefore involves webpage layout and must surely involve Javascript! The trouble is that I don't think the change they've made to Safari in this respect is entirely bug-free.

Setting the Safari font size as suggested worked for me (hopefully will continue to do so) on my powerbook

Just use Chrome, problem solved.

nickcohen wrote:

Setting the Safari font size as suggested worked for me (hopefully will continue to do so) on my powerbook

Hi. Would you mind reporting back if this has taken care of the problem for you -- and if so, outline what you did to correct the freezing issue?

Am continuing to have this issue re-occur and having to "hard stop" the mac with power button is a real burden.

Going into safe mode didn't work for me on this. Hoping an answer comes up soon. I'm using Chrome more often than not now.

So I have been the same problem and posted about it too. Just got off the phone with apple and after a 30 min talk what seemed to be working is this.

Go to safari preferences/Advance/ and on Accessability check "NEVER USE FONTS SMALLER THAN" mine says 9. Leave it at that. And that worked for me.

I have a MacBook Yosemite 10.10.5 running safari 10.0.2

Hope it works for all of you.