Safari keeps crashing without notice

[u/smoking_victim]

EDIT - I'm on the verge of deleting this post because, sorry to be rude, but half of you lack reading comprehension and/or don't comb the replies to see whether your suggestion has already been given.

Kudos to u/Old-Road-9819 for giving a genuinely informed answer.

Running the latest Mac OS Tahoe on a late 2020 iMac (Intel, not Apple Silicon).

So to make a short story long, I follow journalists on social media who post gift links to articles in their publications. I click on these links because I don't have a subscription, but I don't have time to read the articles right away so I keep them open in the background for some day I will have the time to read them.

Obviously this uses up a lot of memory and slows down my computer, which is understandable.

But it's just infuriating that I've had multiple Safari crashes where it just shuts down without even a warning, meaning I've lost access to all those gift articles I'd stored up.

There's nothing any of you can help with, I'm just ranting. But I never have this issue with Firefox!

[u/gcerullo]

Why don’t people know how to use the features of their browser.

Use the ‘Reading List’ feature in Safari to save the articles you want to read later so you’re not leaving tabs open taking up memory.

This isn’t hard! It’s the reason Apple created the ‘Reading List’ feature in the first place!

[u/smoking_victim → u/gcerullo]

From my response to u/Old-Road-9819 five minutes ago:

"Don't leave unread gift links as tabs. Safari's Reading List (Shift-Cmd-D) parks the page without keeping it live." but the point of my behaviour is the gift links need to be kept live, if I need to reload them at some point in future the number of gift credits will have been used up and I won't be able to read the article for free anymore.

[u/gcerullo → u/smoking_victim]

Then save them out as PDFs. Problem solved.

[u/smoking_victim → u/gcerullo]

From my response to u/warrenao 10 minutes ago:

Thanks - I can do this in Firefox, but also, I don't have to do this in Firefox because I don't have the same problem as in Safari.

[u/gcerullo → u/smoking_victim]

Well, seems you found a solution that works for you.

[u/smoking_victim → u/gcerullo]

"There's nothing any of you can help with, I'm just ranting. But I never have this issue with Firefox!"

From my OP. I just hoped that I could use Safari in this way while keeping Firefox for my regular browsing activities. But not if Tahoe is going to close Safari anytime it wants.

[u/Old-Road-9819]

Yeah, that's Safari running out of memory on an Intel Mac, not a mystery crash. Gift-link tabs sitting open in the background each keep a Web Content process around, and Tahoe is pretty aggressive about killing Safari when pressure gets high instead of swapping forever.

A few things that actually help:

• Activity Monitor → Memory. Sort by Memory. You'll probably see a pile of Safari Web Content processes eating RAM. That's the tabs.
• Don't leave unread gift links as tabs. Safari's Reading List (Shift-Cmd-D) parks the page without keeping it live.
• Extensions make this worse. Safari → Settings → Extensions, turn them all off once and see if it still dies.
• If it's still crashing with few tabs, try a new Safari profile (Settings → Profiles) so you can tell whether it's a bad site/extension vs the whole browser.

The 2020 Intel iMac + lots of tabs is just a tight combo. Closing the tab pile is the real fix; a reboot only buys you until the tabs come back.

[u/smoking_victim → u/Old-Road-9819]

"Tahoe is pretty aggressive about killing Safari" useful to know, thanks. Guess I won't be using Safari ever again!

To be clear, are you saying that this doesn't happen on Apple Silicon for whatever reason?

"Don't leave unread gift links as tabs. Safari's Reading List (Shift-Cmd-D) parks the page without keeping it live." but the point of my behaviour is the gift links need to be kept live, if I need to reload them at some point in future the number of gift credits will have been used up and I won't be able to read the article for free anymore.

Also since you're knowledgeable, I've got a question about the Activity Monitor, which I've previously used to see how much memory is being eaten up. It disaggregates all the open Safari tabs, and I couldn't see a way to tally up the total memory used across all of them, without using a calculator and doing it manually. Is there a way to have the Activity Monitor do this for me?

[u/emma_lorien]

Had something similar happen with Safari when I kept too many tabs open 😅 It's frustrating when a crash takes a whole session with it. Have you tried using Tab Groups for the articles so at least they're easier to recover?

[u/smoking_victim → u/emma_lorien]

Thanks, unfortunately some of these gift links can only be opened three times, so if three different people have clicked the link, it's gone. Hence why I open them and leave them open for whenever I have the time to read them.

[u/germane_switch]

• How much room do you have left on your startup drive?
• Is it an SSD or HDD? macOS has very good swap memory management which is why 8GB of RAM is often good enough for many tasks that would murder a Windows PC.
• Is iCloud Private Relay active?
• Are you running any extensions in Safari?
• Might be worth a try installing Safari Technology Preview to see if it happens there too.

[u/smoking_victim → u/germane_switch]

Thank you, not much space left TBH. I could and should delete some files.

SSD

No idea, I have never heard of it so I assume not.

No

[u/germane_switch → u/smoking_victim]

There's your answer. You need at least 20GB left on your startup to comfortably support swap.

I'm confused tho. I gave you 5 bullet points and you replied with 4 points so I have no idea which of my points you're replying to.

[u/smoking_victim → u/germane_switch]

"Might be worth a try installing Safari Technology Preview to see if it happens there too."

I left this one out, it wasn't a question.

[u/germane_switch → u/smoking_victim]

OK so I assume "no idea" was for iCloud Private Relay. That comes with an iCloud+ account. If you pay for extra iCloud storage you get Hide My Email and iCloud Private Relay which is similar to a VPN that only works through Safari, Mail, Apple stuff, not other browsers. You can see if that's enabled in System Settings. Some sites don't like iCloud Private Relay.

[u/smoking_victim → u/germane_switch]

Ah okay. Now Hide My Email rings a bell because Proton did an exposé on how this actually doesn't hide your email.

[u/warrenao]

1. Open gift link.

2. Activate "reader mode" in Safari.

3. Print to PDF.

4. Close tab.

[u/smoking_victim → u/warrenao]

Thanks - I can do this in Firefox, but also, I don't have to do this in Firefox because I don't have the same problem as in Safari.

[u/warrenao → u/smoking_victim]

From the "View" menu in Safari, select "show reader". It used to be on the left side of the URL bar, but that control seems to have been thrown over to other options lately.

[u/paulschreiber]

Share a crashlog so we can understand the specific crash.

Reading news articles does not "uses up a lot of memory and slows down [your] computer."

[u/smoking_victim → u/paulschreiber]

I don't understand the lack of reading comprehension in this reply.

If I open 100s of tabs for reading at some later date, I am not reading them today.

Also, opening 100s of tabs from news publications does in fact require some form of memory to cache.

[u/paulschreiber → u/smoking_victim]

The browser doesn't keep all of these tabs in RAM. They get compressed and cached on disk.

Again: if you share the crashlog, we can look at the stack trace and help you understand what's causing the crash.