Safari memory leak issues

[Dom.S]

Safari has become almost completely unusable for me recently. It’ll be working fine one minute and then suddenly consume all system memory (and then some) the next. It’s not a gradual leak over hours/days, it’ll just consume RAM at multiple GB/sec until it falls over. At times I can replicate it consistently by browsing to certain sites, but that’s not consistent and at other times it leaks immediately on launch – even with a shift+click ignore-previous-session startup.

I’ve tried various things to fix it including rebooting, upgrading to Ventura, disabling all extensions and booting into safe mode. I’ve had crashes on two different M1 machines as well (Studio & MBP).

Has anyone else been running into this? This is exclusively a Safari issue, I’m not having issues with any other apps.

 

[bogdanw]

Do you use iCloud Bookmarks? Try Safari after logging out of iCloud/AppleID.

 

[Dom.S]

Logging out of iCloud altogether isn’t feasible but I’ve just tried switching off Safari syncing in iCloud prefs, deleting all but a handful of bookmarks and deleting all of the ~/Library/Safari/History.db* files… and the browser has crashed twice within minutes of being opened.

Couple this with the ongoing ethernet connection drops on my Mac Studio and I’m not loving Apple’s attention to detail with Mac software at the moment.

Edit: And for bonus points it’s also just crashed after deleting everything in ~/Library/Safari.

 

[bogdanw]

"clean Safari” AppleScript https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/safari-issues.2354917/post-31383169

 

[steve333]

On Facebook I go to a notification and half the time I won't be able to scroll down, I have to re-load the page
History will not clear completely. I click on erase all history and there is still history from yesterday and today there.
I also had to enter some kind of verification that didn't work, so I switched to Firefox and ut worked without having to need a verification
Safari is a mess.