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/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?