Safari stability

bbloke

bbloke

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I have a question for everyone about how stable they find Safari. I'm running OS X (10.3.4) on a QuickSilver 2002 DP 1 GHz G4 with 1.5 GB of RAM (installed by Apple), and I find Safari (version 1.2.2) crashes quite a bit. I don't know about "everyday" but certainly several times per week. I tend to open apps and just leave them running, and often find Safari guzzling RAM (hundreds of MB; Activity Monitor says it has currently set aside 93 MB of real memory and 324 MB of virtual memory). To be fair, Safari has been more stable under Panther, but I'd still prefer it to be more stable than it is!

I've never had OS X crash on me since I bought the G4, so I would not suspect any hardware issues. When I upgraded to 10.2 and later to 10.3, I wiped the hard drive and did a clean install in order to start from scratch, so I would not suspect a corrupted system. Safari has always been my most buggy app under both 10.2 and 10.3. I do have other apps crash on me, but far less frequently. Maybe another app (not always the same one) might crash on me once during the week, or something... maybe not that often. I'm curious to know how other people find the app stability and, if very different from my own experience, whether I need to look into something!

Thanks. :)
 
Mine never crashes on either of my machines. I'd suggest tossing out the com.apple.safari.plist file. (or just moving it to the desktop for backup purposes ) However, if you do, you'll get the default bookmarks back (mixed in with yours) and all your preferences get reset. Easy to re-configure since there aren't many but I just wanted to let you know.
 
Only had Safari crash a handful of times, and for the most part that was back when it was ver.1.2.0 and I visited a site with some nasty JS in it.

It does eat gobs of memory sometimes...which can be quite annoying, but it's much more stable than the alternatives (IE, Firefox, etc.) for me.
 
I find it very stable. Have you checked previous threads? If you autofill on for all, it can become bloated and crash. But with Safari Enhancer to deactivate the cache permanently and pithhelmet to help with annoying ads, it's a wonderful browser.
 
Thanks for the feedback, guys. :)

More or less immediately after your posts, I deleted the plist and I unticked one of the autofill boxes. Since that time, I have not had one crash... ! :D

So it could have been a corrupted plist (although possibly not, as I wiped the disk when I installed 10.3, and I was having problems with Safari under 10.2 too) or it could be that the autofill information was bloating it. One odd thing is that there have been a few occasions where it feels less responsive now, taking a second or two to switch between tabs, but this does not happen all the time. At least there is none of the disk thrashing, followed by the spinning cursor, and then a crash, which I used to get a little too regularly!

Anyway, MacFixit had a related article on their site today:

Safari: more on AutoFill and delays; memory leaks

Yesterday we covered a reader report that many Safari slowdowns -- indicated by the dreaded "spinning beachball" -- can be avoided by disabling the "Other forms" box in Safari's AutoFill preferences. We've received confirmations that this "fix" works from a good number of MacFixIt readers. In fact, Chris Gervais notes that with the right tools you can actually see why some of these delays are happening "under the hood":

"I can definitely confirm this. Once I deactived AutoFill, Safari is much quicker and more responsive. If you have Apple's developer tools installed, run the Spin Control application and add Safari to its watch list. It appears that the slow down isn't necessarily Safari's fault; it's a side-effect of how Core Foundation is handling the serialization of property lists (a structure that allows developers to store and recall data). AutoFill form values are kept in a property list (aka plist) in ~/Library/Safari/Form Values. I believe the version written to disk is the binary, not XML, variant. Hopefully Apple is resolving this in Tiger."

Unfortunately, disabling the "Other forms" AutoFill option also means that you don't benefit from Safari's AutoFill feature for any sites listed in the Edit dialog. If you want to keep this functionality for certain sites, just open the Edit dialog next to the "Other forms" checkbox and delete all the sites you don't regularly visit. For most users, this will reduce the number of sites significantly, thus helping to alleviate some of the performance issues caused by this particular issue.

Alternatively, reader "landi" notes that "If you have just a few AutoFill pages, disable AutoFill in [Safari] preferences and then add the AutoFill button to your [Safari toolbar] for 'manual AutoFill' as needed." (You can add the AutoFill button to the Safari toolbar by choosing View -> AutoFill.)

Memory leaks We periodically receive messages from readers about excessive memory usage by Safari; the most recent version of Safari, version 1.2.2 (v125.8), seems to be generating more of these reports than we've seen in quite a while. Over the past couple days, we've received two email messages that are fairly representative. Pat Slice has been experiencing "World Leak" error messages when quitting Safari. (We've received similar reports from readers who see these error msesages when closing Safari windows.) And D. Bruce Stevens writes:

"I’ve stopped using Safari for the most part (unfortunately) because of the delays and spinning beach ball. During the time I was using it, I noticed that after I experienced a delay in Safari, I’d find delays in other apps as well, especially switching between them. Though I’m not highly technical, it seemed to me that this was caused by a page-out. So I downloaded Memory Stick to alert me to page-outs. I found that during the spinning beachball delays with Safari, I was getting page-outs...sometimes two or three within a few minutes. I don’t know if that’s due to a memory leak or what, but it was excessive. When I stopped using Safari and began to use Mozilla, things were a lot better."

At least one MacFixIt staffer has seen similar behavior using the latest version of Safari, as well as significantly more crashes and "spinning beachballs" than with previous versions.
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One for the Randman. :D Btw, check an older thread here on resetting the delay time on loading pages in Safari. That will makes it speedier as well now that you have the beach ball packed away (btw, I've also found that quitting Safari and restarting after prolonged usage (like at the end of the day) also keeps things moving along.
 
i don't recommend that trick randman. Seemed to make mine slower. Faster at first but slower in the long run. I just don't understand it.
 
But you _do_ know that means that actually the page could not be found, right? I find it funny how people sometimes just assume that an error message can't possibly mean what it actually says. ;-)

About the stability of browsers in General: Web browsers are the WORST application genre I have ever met on a computer system. Would we accept rendering problems, crashes and user interface alterations like that in an application like Photoshop? NEVah! That said, OmniWeb and Safari are better than the rest in the user interface area, I think, but still: Web browsers suck. They're inevitable, but they still suck big time. ;-)
 
fryke said:
But you _do_ know that means that actually the page could not be found, right? I find it funny how people sometimes just assume that an error message can't possibly mean what it actually says. ;-)
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Not always. There's times where I'll get the slide down sheet saying that the page can't be loaded and all you have to do is hit enter in the URL bar to try to load the page again and it works fine.
 
Correct safari does it all the time says the page connot be found then you just press enter and it loads its happened on google.com apple.com (pages i know that exist)

(so its funny how you just assume that im stupid and its not an acctual bug with an apple application)
 
I still have font problems with my safari when I try to use hotmail. It's the only thing keeping me from ditching explorer entirely. I downloaded the font cleaner utility, and I use suitcase and have tried everything I can think of. Any suggestions?
 
Natobasso said:
I still have font problems with my safari when I try to use hotmail. It's the only thing keeping me from ditching explorer entirely. I downloaded the font cleaner utility, and I use suitcase and have tried everything I can think of. Any suggestions?
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What font utility did you use? Did you try Font Cache Expunger?
 
Font Cache Cleaner, actually. I got it from Version Tracker; it was a great idea I found here, actually. :)

But Safari still continues to misread my hotmail with fractions. Crap!
 
fryke said:
But you _do_ know that means that actually the page could not be found, right?
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WRONG!

Safari has always given page prompts that a page could not be found. A simple refresh usually loads the page. In fact, previews of Tiger with the next version of Safari have said that Apple has even reworked (as of now) the sentence when a page isn't loaded right away.
 
Natobasso said:
But Safari still continues to misread my hotmail with fractions. Crap!
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What's the text encoding say? Can you change it to something else (such as whatever western it isn't on) and see if that changes anything.
 
In an update to the thread, MacFixit today posted this story:

Safari Auto-Fill delays (#3): Too many form elements; more

Last week we reported that many Safari slowdowns -- indicated by the dreaded "spinning beachball" -- can be avoided by disabling the "Other forms" box in Safari's AutoFill preferences. We've since received confirmations that this "fix" works from a number of MacFixIt readers.

We've since identified some additional reasons why this problem is happening. MacFixIt reader A. Lee Bennet writes:

"The problem is also apparent if a particular web page simply has a _lot_ of form elements on it. I'm the comments editor for About This Particular Macintosh. We have a script that auto populates an HTML page with just the comments for a desired page and each comment contained a text box and a button for three different editing functions--so that's three text fields and three buttons for every comment. The public never sees these pages. Mostly only me. On a few pages where we have many comments, the edit page ends up with lots of form elements, i.e. there's a page that contains a desktop wallpaper photo of the World Trade Center and, after 9/11, this page now contains nearly 1,000 comments, which means nearly 3,000 text fields and 3,000 buttons. Safari takes insane amounts of time before I can use this page if I ever have to do something to a comment. Fortunately, we have a workaround that since created just one set of the form elements that works for whichever comment I've indicated. "
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Anyone know how to fix that 'page not found' error when you know it exists? I mean a refresh usually fixes it but it's annoying.
 
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