macOS Sierra freeze on iMac late 2009 using Safari

I installed 10.12.4 public release, and un-did riadfromhabsheim's Safari debug modification/fix . Used Safari (and iTunes) all day. So far zero crashes. Too soon to tell for sure but it is looking promising that 10.12.4 may have a fix.

I installed 10.12.4 and used Safari and iTunes all day without a crash. I also uninstalled the work around fix from this discussion. I also have a late 2009 iMac with a SSD, if that helps. So 10.12.4 is promising so far.

Thanks for the tip (the deactivation of the 'accelerated drawing components' within Safari), for my machine at least it seems to have done the trick!

Same issue. iMac freezing once or twice a day. I quit using Safari as that seemed to be the source of the issue and was confirmed by the forums full of the same Safari related problems. Started using Chrome exclusively. The freezing seemed to cease and then after a couple of months… the iMac freezes, mouse pointer functioning again, no force quit, system absolutely dead. A hard reboot was required on each occasion. I checked the hard drive, video card, mother board… all ticking along nicely. It had to be a software issue. I did notice the problem seemed to occur when iTunes and Chrome (especially when I was streaming content for iPlayer for example) were open together.… maybe a coincidence or my paranoia. It's been driving me insane for the past couple of months but lately was becoming a more regular issue (freezing 3-4 times a day) to extent that I was contemplating on retiring the 'old girl' and selling a kidney and buying a new one.

But no… another day another 'freeze' another reboot and a last but hopeful trawl through the forums to find a solution. An lo… the 'accelerated drawing components' deactivation. What the ****… I'll give it ago. And lo… it's been a day and half without a single 'freeze' (which is, in itself a bloody miracle!) and I've switched back to Safari (with some trepidation) but all is good so far. What I don't understand is why the 'system' as a whole seems to be working perfectly now by just this change? Maybe my complete lack of coding expertise or my decades old belief 'that it's a Mac, it just works' mantra still holds true… but which has been sorely tested of late.

I wouldn't normally post but this 'freezing issue' has been around for a while and I assumed that it had been addressed by the recent Sierra updates. Like a lot of people I'm clinging onto my 'antiquated' iMac for the sake of my bank balance until it explodes. To discover that it might be OS software issue (of which I've had my suspicions) and not my iMac makes it more galling that Apple have not even acknowledged or addressed the issue. Or maybe I've missed something! Anyhow thanks again… and to anyone with the same issue give it a go… you have nothing to lose except your sanity.

Spec: iMac (27-inch, Late 2009), 2.66 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB, macOS Sierra Version 10.12.3

All I did to uninstall the discussion board fix was to open Safari, choose Debug, and from the drop down menu --- un-check the two boxes that I had checked to enable the fix. I don't recall the names of those 2 items but they are the items suggested by the ingenious inventor of the workaround. Day #2 with 10.12.4 and no crashes. Without any solution before I was crashing hourly, every day. Fingers crossed 10.12.4 continues without issue!

After a week with the ATI 'fix' to disable hardware acceleration on my 2009 era iMac , several crashes encountered. This is really horrible Apple! I am disgusted that this has not been fixed after months of instability for us users! Not sure I will replace this computer with another Mac when it comes time!

I had this same issue happen to me I am glad I am not alone. After I updated to ten. twelve. Four I was experiencing freezing issues whenever I was on a webpage in Safari. I also was After I updated to 10.12.4 I was experiencing freezing issues whenever I was on a webpage in Safari. I also was having a continuous loop when I rebooted the machine after applying the update. I went ahead and traveled to the Apple store this morning, and the genius reverting my machine reverted my machine back to factory settings after wiping the hard drive I then rebuilt the machine with a Time Machine backup after rebooting the machine the same issue happened with the continuous boot loop. So, I decided to go back to an old Time Machine backup, and I will wait for these bugs to be resolved before updating to 10.12.4 again.

I am on a 15in MacBook Pro Mid July 2015 Laptop.

- Yep, updating to Sierra, made the iMac freezing, when browsing with Safari.

- After applying the fix (posted by riadfromhabsheim) which disables hw acceleration, Safari worked without any more freezing.

- After updating Sierra to 10.12.4, re-enabled hw acceleration settings (aka restored everything as it was before the fix), and Safari has been happy again ever since, no problems.

Looks like the Safari or the OS or the driver programmer team at Apple fixed the issue and rolled into the 10.12.4. update.

Having installed Sierra 10.12.4 and removed the work-around I have not seen any freeze while working with Safari and using the iMac as I used to do. Problem seems to be fixed. Thank you all for making this to happen.

Having the same feeling but I haven't seen any confirmation yet from Apple. My Bugreport gots closed as a duplicate and the referred origin Bugreport got also closed. But I don#t have access to the original Bug to verify that resolutions!

As far as I know, this freeze affected old iMacs of ~2009/2010 vintage. I'm on 10.12.4 and have re-enabled the various graphics accel options, and have not seen the freeze in a few weeks now, so it appears fixed to me.

On a new MBP it must be a different problem- is there another thread for that ?

Still having the problem after 10.12.4 upgrade AND riadfromhabsheim's fix on a 2010 Mac Pro 6 core. My newer MBP has the problem with 10.12.3. Haven't tried the update or fix on that machine yet. Think I'll just move to Chrome and be done with it. Disappointing.

I started having this same issue when 10.12.4 came out. After the update, Safari would start becoming unresponsive and my mouse barely moved. After a minute or two it would freeze completely requiring a hard shutdown of my MacBook Pro.

After some testing, the only thing I found was that by disabling JavaScript would it stop freezing. Obviously this isn't a real solution as just about every webpage now relies on JavaScript. I had one page that would always freeze after about two minutes, but once JavaScript was turned off, it worked for over 30 minutes.

After some investigation, I've found a few others with the same problem and one had a crash report showing the the JavaScriptCore either crashed or froze up. Obviously this isn't happening in other browsers and sandboxing is supposed to prevent this problem, but Safari's implementation of their new JavaScript engine which was supposed to make it faster appears to be the culprit. JavaScript itself can't be the problem as other browsers would also crash and they have no issues at all. So it has to be Safari's new JavaScript acceleration code they added to Safari. At least that's my guess at this point.

I have to admit to quite a bit of frustration here. I prefer to use Safari, but this is debilitating. I can't function like this, so I have to choose between Chrome, which monitors pretty much everything you do in a browser, and Firefox of which I'm not a huge fan of. Maybe I should try Opera. No one screws with that browser it seems.

Same problem here on a cMP with NVidia card on 10.12.4

The curious thing here is, that it happened once after a restart in the login screen and another day directly after logging in with no applications running. (and sometimes while running Safari)

So i would not pin this down to a Safari-only issue.

But to be honest, i'm kinda happy its seems to be "only" a software issue rather than a serious hw-issue...

I just installed an earlier build of the NVIDIA Driver Manager; 367.15.10.45f01 while keeping the latest CUDA driver. It's early days, but that seemed to help some lagging after brief inactivity (5-10sec. of system freeze after 5-10 min of non-use) and stability in FCPX. I'm going to try Safari again and see if there's any difference. I've got the Apple blessed GTX680.