The Safari app on my wife’s 2018 Macbook Air is definitely bent sideways quite a bit. It beachballs immediately upon launch. The Finder thinks it’s unresponsive, as it offers the Force Quit option in the right-click menu on Safari’s Dock icon. But if we wait long enough (30 minutes?), Safari will actually start showing windows, and allow some interaction, but it’s still chewing nearly 100% of all cores’ CPU time, according to Activity Monitor.
At that point, you can see that there are many windows open, each with many tabs. Some windows are duplicates in terms of content. The Window menu lists around five windows with normal titles, and maybe two or three dozen other windows each with the title of “* Error” (the asterisk is actually a little diamond character). If you choose “Close all windows” from the File menu, the five “normal” windows close, but all the “Error” windows are still listed in the Windows menu (although they don’t show on screen).
So I’m looking for advice on how to clean things up. I’m hoping there’s a plist file somewhere that controls the windows Safari tries to open on launch, which is my guess as to the root cause (i.e., corrupted file). The machine is due for an update to Sequoia, and if that will install a fresh copy of Safari and all of its related control files, we could certainly do that (assuming Sequoia will run on her Mac). And the nuclear option is available…after all the machine is six years old.
Thanks!