Is it just me?
Since buying my M1 MacBook Air with now with Monterey 12.1, Safari 15.2 has become almost unusable on many websites including this site, Macrumors, Tidbits and many others. It’s fine, for example, on BBC News and Twitter. I either have to use force quit as it’s stopped responding, or I get the spinning beachball whilst it thinks about loading. Even after typing the last sentence the ‘beachball’ span for 45 seconds before letting me continue. I’ve moved largely to Firefox or Chrome now.
No such problems at all here (14" MBP, 12.1). Have you tried disabling all extensions?
Do your problems persist when booted in safe mode? If so, what does Apple Diagnostics say. If nothing, consider re-installing macOS on top of your existing install (from Recovery Mode).
Thank you - unfortunately neither worked so maybe a reinstall is the way to go next. I’m typing this in Safari after booting in safe mode and still getting the beach ball.
If in Safe Mode you’re still observing this, one other thing to try would be logging into a vanilla user account. If the behavior persists there it’s either macOS or hardware. The latter should reveal itself with Apple Diagnostics. The former calls for a re-install from Recovery Mode.
It is frustrating that Safari is deeply integrated into macOS. Most other apps can be deleted and reinstalled to fix corruption. Not so with Safari.
My issue, with Safari & Mojave is that my bookmarks sometimes take minutes to load. It only happens on my iMac, not on a Macbook or iPad. And it seems to be intermittent.
I hadn’t realised the integration was so deep. Like you Safari works as it should on my iPad and iPhone. Having to reinstall the entire OS is a little overkill for a browser when Chrome, Firefox etc all work as they should.
It’s not nice I agree, but with Monterey it’s really not such a big deal. You reboot in Recovery Mode and you install the latest and greatest from there. It installs over your previous macOS, none of your personal docs or apps gets touched. It does touch more than just /System obviously because Safari (among other things) lives in /Data—for good reason, but perhaps also the reason it can become corrupted (as here?). Anyway, less than an hour later you should be back in business. Perhaps a task best left running while you take a meal break or over night. Granted it’s not perfect, but it really shouldn’t interfere with your work.
I took your advice thank you and, 36 minutes later whilst having a cup of tea, a fresh install of Monterey.
The good news - no longer a spinning beachball on this site, the BBC and a few others that were problematical and I’m using Safari right now. However when I type the page does hang momentarily part way through a word then releases again after a few seconds.
The bad news - still got the spinning ball trying to reach MacRumors - just taken a minute to load.
I think the moral is - if I want use Safari then read Macrumors on another browser.