10.11.4 Safari freeze

Last night I woke the iMac from sleep, fired up Activity Monitor to keep an eye on things, immediately tried to launch Mail and it wouldn't. Spinning beachball. No Safari or any browser running. This is an OS problem.

I updated flash to 21.0.0.226 a few minutes ago and restarted Safari. The Mac froze just moments later! And not while using flash. It froze when I clicked on a link in Google search page! I forced it to shutdown with the power button, restarted it, and wrote this post.

MBP froze with beta 2 few minutes ago.

Still no effective fix more than one month after the problem appears on 10.11.4.

What an effective support from Apple. 1.5K for a computer freezing randomly for 1 month now.

In Safari? Could you give more details? Were you watching video? Was in Safari 9.1.1 or one of the tech preview releases of Safari? Any info helps and I suppose at this point we may all need to try to simply avoid situations that tend to cause crashes.

I agree that the non-response from Apple is totally lame.

In firefox.

It's not related to Safari.

It happened to me on firefox and chrome extensionless. And other people without web browsing.

Web browsing with Safari is the main activity for most people on a macintosh i guess, the reason why it happens more often when surfing on the internet than other stuff.

But it seems it's a deep driver/framework system issue, like graphic, and impossible to avoid.

If it's a graphic driver issue for exemple, Apple will have to wait a fix from Intel, because Cupertino do not make drivers for third party components.

It's already said much. I already described my issue few pages above (exactly the same as others). I hadn't been facing the issue for a week till tomorrow. I haven't watched video. Just opened one tab with news web-site (no video, no flash, just pictures and text). Then went back to Facebook (btw it was pinned) - freeze.

I don't think there is a trouble with flash or something. The same trouble for example occurs often in Photos (as well as in Safari). For me it was during watching videos in Photos. But, for example, I haven't seen any freezes during watching videos in Safari. It only happens when I click on a link on a web-page or switching between the tabs. Few times I've seen freezes after waking up from sleep mode. Maybe it was still Safari trouble, because I always have it turned on.

It is also funny with Apple feedback. I called them, they said: 'Of course, we will handle your issue, because you're not happy user of your brand new MacBook'. At that moment I thought 'wow, so kind, I almost believe you'. So we did cache cleans and so on. The support-girl said - here is my e-mail, contact me if the problem returns. So it did. After it did I tried to contact the support via this email three times - no replies at all. Lol. What a feedback. And it is the newest model of the Macbook.

And yes, seems it's like not related to Safari, but other browsers too. It's just I use only Safari.

I called Apple Care today, It was, seriously, the ninth time. The last week I talked with an agent and she told me that she will do everything as she can. I think oh well, everything is gonna be ok. When I tried to call her for complaining again for this amazing issue she didn't answer the phone (6 times). Today I was talking with other agent and finally I get that he send the files (disk image) of the error to the apple support. Maybe they reply with news on Sunday.

They can't do anything. Most geniuses are watching these boards, so they know there is a wide spread problem since 10.11.4. but since Cupertino is ignoring it, geniuses all over the world can just complain for you.

In France, and i think in Europe, we got a 2 years warranty for non-conformity products, and you can ask the replacement or refund of your product if you cannot use it the way you should, when there is a problem that can't be fixed.

http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guarantees-returns/index _en.htm

The problem is now up for more than 1 month, and Apple doesn't seem to care about it.

So in my case, i won't wait more, and i'll ask the refund of my mac bought on Mai 2015 for non-confimity and unfixed problem.

If there are Europeans ****** of this issue and Apple silence, you can learn how warranty works in you country and maybe use it for getting a refund or replacement.

I was once a very disgruntled PC/Windows user. When I finally made the switch to Apple and the iMac, one would have thought I died and went to heaven. I was so pleased with the design, the way the computer performed, and, most of all, it was issue free. No more defrag. No more daily updates.

I started noticing a possible freeze issue with 10.11.3, but wanted to believe it was me ... something I might have been doing. Then 10.11.4 came along and the freeze-up became a daily issue. Is it me or has the quality started to lapse when Mr. Jobs passed away? C'mon Apple, you're better than this.

Gotta agree: Apple is not the same.

I emailed SJ twice about issues, and in one case he replied, and in the other case I got a phone call the next morning from someone on the "executive services team" (I am not an executive!) who offered to replace my ailing laptop. Just send in the old one and he'll mail me a new one. I explained that, even with the issues I was having, I still used that computer all day every day, so could they ship me a new one with a charge on my credit card and then refund the charge once I return the old one? I'll never forget the response:

"Well, we usually don't do this, but I'll ship you the new one, and then just send the old back to us."

THAT is the Apple I knew. Gone now, I think.

Same think here. I bought a new MBA 11" (Early 2015) at start of this year that already shipped with 10.11.3 and I had no problems whatsoever.

Than I installed 10.11.4 and the hole system starts to freeze completely from time to time while watching YouTube-Videos with Safari.

First time it happen I thought as a long time OSX user "well that can happen, even if it is extremely rare(once for 2 or 3 years or less) on a Mac"

(but normally you see the debug output of a kernel freeze too).

Second time I was wondering if my Mac had an hardware issue? So I start to check with Apple Hardware check and a Ram-test, but both found no hardware issues?

Third time I start to lock into the console log files and found that log entry of watchdogd that WindowServer is not responding.

"service (com.apple.WindowServer) reported as unresponsive"

I google for it and founds a lot of forums and threads with people having the same issue since 10.11.4 so it is probably an issue of the operating system. Since the update 10.11.4 changes the intel graphics drivers this would be my first guess what causes the problems or at least is involved in it.

After 4 freeze I start to become a bit angry and enable the ssh-server on my mac that in case of next freeze I can try to kill the hanging windowserver and restart the GUI. I test in normal operation and a kill of the WindoServer restarts the GUI as expected.

During the 5 freeze I really could connect to the frozen system via SSH and so we can say that not the entire system is frozen some processes still running, but all the GUI is frozen.

I try to kill WindowServer as I tried before but the „killall -HUP WindowServer“ was not working, also an „top“ was hanging maybe due to the hanging WindowServer. After restart of system again I realized that I not tried the harder „killall -KILL WindowServer“.

I did not wait for the 6 freeze and roll back 10.11.3 system from an older time machine backup. And than rollback my user folder and applications from a newer backup. I restored my newer applications, because an older version iTunes (like the one of 10.11.3) normally not works with an iTunes-Library that was opened with an newer version of iTunes (like the ne from 10.11.4). But after restoring this mixed version of the two backups iBooks was not longer working. And after I try to reconnect my account in iTunes I saw that also a connection was not longer possible with iTunes. In system logs I saw a problem with the PrivateFramework BookKit.framework. So I restore from my older backup Version 1.4 (I had 1.5 before). Now iTunes Account could reconnect, but iBooks was still not working. I need to delate my local iBooks-Library first and start a new one before iBooks was again up and running.

So final conclusion is that Backup with 10.11.3 is only than a good solution if you can life without newer data. But if you mix a backup of system from 10.11.3 with user and application data backup of 10.11.4 you can end up with a lot of mess as I did. Maybe my main mistake was that I roll back my applications from 10.11.4. So take care if you try.

Now my 10.11.3 system with newer user data is up and running and I had no more freezes in the last 3 days. Fingers crossed. 😉

Any solution for people like me that don't have a backup in time machine? I'm desperate

If it's really anoying for you, temporary install a Linux distro (with Virtualbox for exemple). A real one, with a real support (not like OSX, the Unix based os with 0 support...)

Yes, from official side of you are desperate until Apple bring a fix for this issue as an update maybe for 10.11.5 or as an later minor bugfix.

You can not official go back to an older version of El Capitan without backup since Apple not longer ships DVD's or USB-Sticks, where you could in past easily buy an older copy from third party shop. El Capitan was only shipped as Download in AppStore or as Download through using your recovery partition. But those two ways only offer the newest version of the OS (at the moment the problematic 10.11.4). So again from Apple side you are desperate.

Is it just me or did Apple pushes the users of OSX step by step in the same direction of restrictions and paternalisms as we already have it with iOS jailing?

If you can't life with it change the system to Windows or Linux or wait until the highness of Apple is graciously enough to help you out.

Oh, I almost forgot, you can always send Apple some feedback:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

If many people reporting the same issue, maybe they will listen...