For over a year now, Safari has failed to render many websites in a readable manner. On many pages, in particular ESPN, lists of statistics are out of line, Text is oversized or undersized, videos will not play when I click on them even though they are allowed in Safari, preferences, etc. At times, I have found it unusable such as when checking out on the Woot site. Any other browser I try works as it should. Attached are some examples of what I have been up against for quite some time now. I have been all over settings to no avail. I can reduce font size to a point that is uncomfortable for me and that helps somewhat, but not completely.
Have you tried creating a new user account and trying those websites in Safari from there? Just to see if the problem is in your setup, rather than Safari itself.
After creating a new account and using Safari, it’s behavior seemed to have normalized. The sites shown in my previous attachment rendered properly. This attachment shows the same sites using Safari under the new account. What now?
That’s a real mixed bag of rendering problems, some being tight/constrained with others excessively oversized. Take a look at the Safari Settings again to double check these tabs:
(Websites) are there sites listed for the Page Zoom item? Adjust or remove.
(Extensions) uncheck then test for each installed extension
(Advanced) for Style Sheet choose “None Selected”.
(Advanced) is features for web developers box checked? If yes…
…go to the Develop Menu (top of screen) and ensure User Agent is Default or the first Safari option.
…(Developer) uncheck any/all of these features
If none of that helps, after exporting a copy of your browsing data, you could try creating a Profile in Safari which might give you a clean start. Or quit Safari, pull the Safari plist file and restart.
Tried every normal setting to no avail. Removing the plist file and restarting did the trick. I can’t believe how long I used Safari like this. I tried to move to Chrome and Firefox as default browsers, but decided I didn’t want to give up the integration features, cursing Safari the whole time. Thanks so much for your help!
For the benefit of future readers (and that might be me), it would help to know exactly where the plist file is and what it is named. Searching in ~/Library, I found two plist files with Safari in the file name and two plist files with Safari in the tree but not leaf name. Thanks.