10.11.4 Safari freeze

I already had posted to this question registering my issue...

A few days ago, Adobe Flash updated, and all was fine. I thought all was due to the flash.

A few minutes ago, as I was going to click on facebook tab on safari, everything crashed.

Something I noticed is that the force touch trackpad still works for about 5 seconds after the screen freezes, but then it stops working.

I also noticed that a notification of an email was made via the speakers (the screen was static)

Another thing was that the caps lock still switched on, something which on Windows computers did not happen if the pc crashed. (Mind you, that was the reason I switched to a Mac: the unreliability of the Windows software. I was hoping for things to be better on Mac, which they are, but this bug is not letting me work with my Mac 😠)

Owzamsa,

That is exactly how my crashes were occurring, cursor would freeze and then after 5 seconds or so I would lose the haptic feedback on the force touch trackpad and then everything was frozen, -but- on one occasion an audio podcast just kept right on playing on the frozen Mac! I let it go on for several minutes before I did a force restart.

You might sign up for the 10.11.5 beta and see if that helps your issue. The more testers they get who have the problem in this thread the more likely we are to get a fix.

How do I sign up for that please?

Charles --

If someone is already having a problem, it is better to fix the situation first before upgrading the OS.

Seriously, that just complicates and confuses things . . .

Just my two cents.

After having daily freezes for ages, I haven't had one now for about five days.

All I did was quit using Safari and use Firefox instead.

Sometimes the alternative to banging your head against the wall is to simply tear down the wall.

Hmmmmm. I wish all this could be settled once and for all . . .

There are so many people using all kinds of different set ups having safari problems.

I haven't had any -- and so I keep trying to help others.

Maybe it's time for me to just give up.

Thanks for your comment, Kiraly.

Why post that? So many people in this thread are telling about same issues on Chrome, Firefox and whatever. I use Safari and I haven't been seeing the issue for now for 5 days already too. But last week it was happened. So the fact you switched to Firefox and you haven't been facing the problem for few days isn't telling anything at all - it's just a fortuity. At least, there is Photos app which causes exactly the same.

Just woke the iMac up from sleep, no browser running. Tried to do a manual back up with Time Machine and it froze, spinning beachball. Just had enough time to check the 'User CPU' usage and it was up to 100%.

I know that this problem is not limited to videos. However, whenever it happens while watching a video, it mostly happens right after "un-pausing" a video. Is it just me, or others have noticed it too?

This issue has happened to me a few times since I purchased my early 2015 rMBP 13" this summer. I'm not sure when it began. This happened earlier today to me, so I decided to do some researching of the issue. Upon hearing about Safari as a potential culprit, I closed it. I was playing an .mp4 file in quicktime and while scrubbing, the freezing occurred. It happened exactly like everyone else...screen freezes, keyboard and trackpad are no longer responsive, and the only way to get it back to normal is a powerdown and restart.

I honestly don't use my rMBP that much...I have a crappy lenovo for work. I can only imagine that if I used this computer for work that my life would be a living nightmare. This is totally unacceptable.

What version of OS X are people reverting to where this issue no longer remains? I am seeing reports that 10.11.3 is doing the same thing. Should I go back further until Apple sorts this thing out? Can anyone confirm that using TM to go back to 10.11.3 fixes the random freezing?

For me the Safari freezing issue started long before 10.11.4. I reported it to Apple most recently in November when I was running 10.11.1. But it started quite a long time before that, possibly as far back as 10.9.x, but definitely by 10.10.x.

At the last couple of freezes I've noticed, using iStat Menus, that a process called 'distnoted' was hogging all the processor, up to 100%. The process itself (distnoted) was registering at over 380%. Soon after that other processes started 'not responding' including iStat Menus and Finder requiring a hard reboot. Turns out that 'distnoted' has been a problem with memory leakage in the past, which has supposed to have been rectified. I can't really find out exactly what 'distnoted' does so it's probably not safe to quit it but it seems to be involved with Notification Centre so I've found a Terminal command to quit Notification Centre and I'll let that run for a while and see what happens. That doesn't quit 'distnoted' though which is still active and may cause problems. Maybe others here could take this further as I'm no techy but it does seem to me that 'distnoted' is involved somewhere.

@Dod60, I believe distnoted is definitely not the root of the problem.

I would just like to confirm that after updating to 10.11.4, both Safari and Safari Technology Preview have completely locked up my computer multiple times a day when watching or attempting to watch a video.

@Yoonsik. You could of course be right as I'm no techy but I've noticed that every time I've had the freeze 'distnoted' has got all the processor power. Nothing else can get a look in so everything hangs. I've sent a report to Apple and let them think about it.

Has anyone fixed the crashes at all even by getting replacement hardware? I'm seriously at a loss of what to do.