Safari 4 Crash Proof?

[ipedro]

Wasn't one of Safari 4's features to sandbox different Safari tabs and windows so that if one site crashed it wouldn't bring down the whole app?

I've been having a lot of general Safari crashes lately. I'm running it on Snow Leopard.

I emptied my cache and deleted the majority of my cookies (only kept a few from reliable sites I visit often).

Any advice? Does your Safari 4 crash often or am I seeing something specific to my system?

 

[J the Ninja]

No, Safari does not sandbox windows/tabs. That means each page is it's own process in the system. Google Chrome does this, but Safari has one process for all the pages. What Safari does do:

Safari in Snow Leopard is 64bit. Supposedly, this brings performance boosts to page rendering. Probably due to the architecture tweaks in x86-64. However, you can't use 32bit plugins with a 64bit app. Safari has a rather clever way of dealing with this, that also makes it very crash resistant: It's spins plugins off into their own process, which then feeds the results back to the main Safari process. You may have seen these workers running around, they're named "webkitpluginhost". Since a very large percentage of browser crashes are caused by plugins, this setup means the browser itself doesn't crash, the worker process crashes instead, and is restarted when the user refreshes the page.

 

[ipedro]

Thanks for the explanation...

... but unfortunately, neither Safari 4 nor Snow Leopard are doing much to stop the app from crashing. I just checked and it's running in 64bit mode.

 

[gibbz]

While not as frequent in the past, Safari 4 on SL still will crash every now and again on me.

 

[5DollaFootlong]

for a while, safari was constantly crashing when I played flash videos, but that is adobe's fault. Now, it is extremely stable

 

[Catfish_Man]

Any advice? Does your Safari 4 crash often or am I seeing something specific to my system?

Post a Safari crashlog or two, they often contain useful information for tracking down crashes.

 

[ipedro]

As soon as it crashes again, I'll make sure to get the log and post it here.

I tend to keep a lot of tabs open and that's when I notice the most crashes.

 

[maflynn]

Mine crashes sometimes. Its more then rarely but less then a constant issue.

Generally when it occurs, its typically because I have lots of tabs and/or safari windows open doing lots of things at once. It seems to get confused and decides to give up the ghost.

 

[KingYaba]

Try uploading pictures or hell, just browsing through the pop up window to search for a picture to upload. 1/4 times Safari tanks. I've sent probably 200 crash reports to Apple since I've installed Snow Leopard. 10.6.2 BETTER fix this.

 

[GoCubsGo]

I have documented and reported at least one crash a day prior to loading/using webkit.

It would appear that the frequency occurred when I had hulu open alongside of forum spy (for example). I would close forum spy and then hulu would freeze. I tried it with my newspaper (e-edition) alongside of something else such as 9to5Mac and anandtech, it did not seem to crash as often. The newspaper software is actual "software" so it isn't like I'm just on Yahoo News or something.

With webkit I get a crash every other day it would seem. Safari 4, in my opinion, is crappy.

 

[Catfish_Man]

With webkit I get a crash every other day it would seem.

Trunk WebKit crash logs are particularly interesting. For example, I believe the previously mentioned image uploading crash is fixed in it.