Safari is driving me crazy. MacBook Air, Ventura, Safari 17.
Problem A. Periodically, several times a day, Safari will have a sudden fit where it resets every tab, many go blank white, and some tabs lose the URL and can’t be reloaded. This has been going on for a while and I’ve tried several things:
Keep the number of open tabs to a dozen or less; typically I only have a couple of windows open.
Tried running without an ad blocker (currently running AdBlock; I also have ABP extension loaded but not active; it doesn’t seem to matter which one, or none). Try turning off all extensions (only other ones are 1Password and Clip to DevonThink)
I have noticed problems with multiple tabs on YouTube so I avoid having many of those, but that problem was slightly different, see below.
Scrutinized every setting including website-specific ones in Safari settings.
Run Malwarebytes (Free) and DetectX Swift scans repeatedly, nothing turns up.
Quit and restart Safari; reboot computer. I can’t really tell if this makes a difference or not. I have also tried restarting in Safe Mode to clear caches, but have not tried running long in Safe Mode because it would take at least a day to see if the problem returns
Aside from YouTube, it seems to happen no matter what sites are open.
Problem B. This has been going on even longer (Mojave/Catalina), and may or may not be related. If I try to load a new webpage, Safari will complain that some websites aren’t responding and do I want to reload all of them? This seemed to be exacerbated by having too many YouTube tabs open, but it can happen even without any of those.
Problem A is more annoying but I would love any suggestions for dealing with either one. I just spent some time on an Internet search and could not find anyone else with the same complaint, so it may be my system, but Problem B started happening on my previous MacBook Pro.
I have asked before if there was a way to retrieve tabs from a Time Machine backup before (when the “reopen previous windows” menu items fail to help) which might assist you, but also nothing seemed to be known here or in Google.
That’s frustrating, I know. But it’s likely no one has seen the same scenario, and folks here are less likely than in other forums to just wave generic suggestions at you.
But it would be interesting to know whether you have tried using a different browser (like Arc, for instance)? It might help isolate whether the problem is with Safari itself, or if there’s something else in your environment that is the ultimate cause.
My fallback browser is firefox, and I haven’t had it happen there, but then I don’t use it for hours on end. That’s why I’m trying to figure out if it’s something in my Safari environment. I have tried turning off all the extensions.
I guess it’s good that it doesn’t seem to be happening to anyone else, but that makes it harder for me to figure out the problem.
I had seen both Problem A and Problem B in Ventura and earlier. Unfortunately, I never found solutions to either.
I have not encountered those issues in recent versions of Sonoma/Safari.
The main Safari bug I see these days (Safari 17.5) is occasionally I’ll attempt to close a tab using command-W, and the entire multi-tabbed window will close as if I had typed command-shift-W. It has happened on multiple machines, and I am 99.9% sure it only happens when YouTube was active in the tab I was trying to close. Even more interesting, the tab/window is not available via Safari’s “Reopen Last Closed Tab” menu item. Fortunately, it has not happened very often.
I also suspect YouTube. I might download some alternative browser just for YouTube tabs that are open until I have time to watch them, and see if a YouTube-free Safari behaves better.
I ended up creating a Safari profile (though I think that’s a Sonoma and iOS 17 thing) just for my Gmail account and anything that has to do with Google happens there. That keeps me logged out of my Gmail account in my normal Safari windows.
Honestly: I hardly ever use YouTube. If I do, I’m more likely to use the YouTube app on my iPad (or on Apple TV) than a browser window. So I can’t say that I have noticed.