I’m trying to run Safari 14 under Catalina 10.15.7 and it us unusable. It runs for a few minutes and then it freezes. Some time later it might come to life again, but I usually have to restart it. The same thing happened with Safari 13 and I was hoping 14 would fix the problem, but didn’t happen. I have now resorted to Firefox as my default browser. I go back to Safari occasionally to retry it but it never changes. Does anyone have any ideas?
I have been running Safari (13 and 14 as of lately) almost exclusively on the latest Catalina and have had no trouble with it. Could you try creating a fresh admit account and using Safari to surf for a while in that? Might help understand if it’s actually a Safari/Catalina issue, or rather one with your prefs or extensions. In case you run into the same trouble on a vanilla admin account, repeat that test but after booting into safe mode (hold shift on boot).