macOS Sierra freeze on iMac late 2009 using Safari

It just occurred to me that the freeze with Mail also happened after I scrolled down in a message, just like is usually (always?) happens after scrolling down in Safari. Can hardware acceleration be disabled in Mail too?

Apple Support had me update to Sierra, it has not shut down any more but still getting content quit unexpectedly in Safari or webkit.

Matt, what do you recommend. the latest I received was com.apple.WebKit.WebContent quit unexpectedly

Well, @riadfromhabsheim, I tried your fix and, like with all other fixes, I was convinced that it worked for good… But nope, just as I was adding a photo to my Office365 profile, Safari crashed my windowServer again. Swell…

I must confess that I haven't been a good member of the community, though, as an Apple engineer offered to diagnose the issue on my iMac and I haven't replied since. However, it ****** me off that Apple throws old Macs on the trash (vintage as they may be, if they run the latest macOS version they should be properly supported and tested) instead of keeping a few around to test blatantly reproducible and fairly obvious bugs like this, thus relying on their users' valuable time to conduct their testing routines. I mean, I'd love to help you and myself, but I have a thesis to write and work to do, sorry…

This bug went unaddressed for far too long already, to the point that I'm considering buying a used Mid 2011 iMac to get rid of it for good (so far, I've only seen reports of it occurring on 2009 and 2010 machines, but if someone who owns one of those last “fat” models – which are great for me, since they are super easy to crack open to update the processor and WiFi+BT and to install a cheap Fusion Drive config, besides the fact that I already own 32 GB of memory compatible with them – is also suffering from this bug, please do tell me so that I don't end up buying yet another iMac “lemonized” by Apple).

The thing is, even if I find one of those, it's still a big investment and I reckon I'll have some trouble reselling this Late 2009 model to iPhone users (which, let's face it, a sizeable proportion of professional Mac users are), as they, like me, might value iCloud Safari syncing, and I'm far too honest to make a sale without giving out all the necessary warnings and the computer's full history (like the processor and Fusion Drive upgrades that I made, the CPU fan replacement it underwent, etc…).

I mean, seriously, this goes to show just how wrong Apple's internal processes and priorities are set right now.

This worked for me in my iMac, tested for one week without freezes, if I enable back again the freezes come back in hours.

I too suffer from this freezing issue, it still happens even with the latest version of Sierra released on 1/23/17. This problem will occur on a fresh install on a new hard drive with no data transferred over.

It happens most often when Safari is running but I have had it happen when Safari was not open as well.

AAfter suffering the same issue, after upgrading to 10.12.3, everything works fine again. Safari goes really quickly and I haven't experience new issues. At least until now. My iMac seem the same it was.

An update for my situation. I haven't had a freeze in 8 days. So disabling hardware acceleration in Safari seems to solve the problem. I noticed no speed differences in Safari. I'm still on macOS Sierra 10.12.2.

I hope so too, although 10.12.5 is still two updates away. I'm currently on 10.12.3. Your fix seems to solve the problem, but not completely. Freezes are less frequent, but I've had two this week, both when viewing a PDF in Safari.

So to everyone, support had me re-install Sierra, I am running 10.12.3 also and appears to be running smoothly now too. No shutdowns or freezes. However I have not enabled any plugins yet. My PDFs are slow in Safari but I am careful of what I do all at once on this computer. Hopefully a fix will be coming soon for those of us that don't want to just ditch our perfectly good late 2009 computers.

Same issue here on a 2014 Mac Mini. First time in nearly a decade that my entire Mac has crashed, taking down everything I was working on. I'm speechless that such a serious bug could have made it into production code.

Hi.

I'm new to this issue! After upgrade to Sierra (10.12.3 iMac 27 late2009) two weeks ago I had two freeze in Safari.

In the Debug mode it's possible to Disable full page accelerated drawings.

But it's not possible to chose Disable canvas accelerated drawing! It's marked with grey text!

Hi. Just adding my voice to the choir. I too have had the freezes (exactly as described in the original post) on my late 2009 iMac (ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB). The freezes started after installation of SSD and a simultaneous update to Sierra. Glad to hear that it doesn't seem to be related to the SSD which I did suspect.

Thanks to riadfromhabsheim for starting this thread, for the possible temporary solution (trying it out now), and for keeping us posted on your feedback from Apple. Hope a proper fix will indeed come in 10.12.5.

I had random freezes after upgrading my OS on my Late model 2009 iMac. I was a late adopter of Sierra thinking that I could avoid bugginess, but alas, I was wrong. I did everything I could to narrow down the problem before checking the forums. It's been two days now, and no random freezes. You are the real MVP here.

I've been waiting for release 10.12.4 , and hope someone with a late model 2009 has actually installed it to give us a report if this issue is resolved for them.

I'd also be interested to know how it works with Adobe CS6, particularly Photoshop and Illustrator. They both work fine on El Capitan after installing legacy Java for OS X and hope that's the same for 10.12.4

Well, I applied this fix / workaround to my late 2009 iMac a week or so ago and no crashes! Even if this fix reduces the frequency rather than eliminates it, I am happy.

For me, the issue usually happened shortly after the iMac woke from sleep. It has been happening for several years, so pre macOS Sierra.

Thanks riadfromhabsheim, sterling work!