attempt to right click on a hyperlink in safari causes safari to freeze

Question

I have my macbook pro 2013 model with macOS updated to Catalina, everytime I try to right click on a hyperlink in the safari browser , safari freezes then I had to force quit.

my safari browser also freezes when I try to open file dialog box. I have taken the above screenshot from activity monitor.

any help will be greatly appreciated..

Answer 1

We can look at a system-wide stackshot to try to understand why the open panel XPC service hangs:

1. Run the following Terminal command to enable kernel symbolication: sudo nvram boot-args="keepsyms=1". Make sure to copy-paste this so that you're entering straight quotes rather than curly/“smart” quotes. (If you get a permission error, you will first need to disable System Integrity Protection. You can re-enable it after you're done with this investigation.)
2. Reboot your machine and don’t open any apps except for Terminal.
3. In Terminal, enter the following command, press Return, type in your password, but do not press Return again yet: sudo spindump -reveal -noProcessingWhileSampling
4. Open Safari and start browsing as normal. Go ahead and reproduce the failing condition at this point.
5. Once the hang occurs, go to the Terminal window where you entered your password and press Return so that the command begins to execute. Do not do anything else on the computer while it's running, otherwise you will distort the data collection.
6. After waiting for >10 seconds to collect a sample and another minute or two to symbolicate and format, you’ll get a file in /tmp/spindump.txt that contains a stackshot of every process.
7. Upload the file to PasteBin or some equivalent place and add the link to it to your original question.