Within a few seconds to a couple minutes of launching, Safari (version 15.2 on macOS Catalina 10.15.7) freezes with a “wait” cursor (beach ball). Even if I open to an empty start page and just let it sit there, it quickly freezes. I’ve tried all the following with no success in fixing it:
- Launch Safari in “safe mode” to disable extensions by holding shift, then clicking Safari’s icon in the Mac Dock.
- Suggestions from Apple’s “If Safari on Mac doesn't open a webpage or isn’t working as expected” article:
- Check for software updates.
- Test using a private browsing window.
- Confirm that network connection works.
- Delete all Safari extensions.
- Restart my Mac.
- Clear all Safari history.
- Delete all stored site data (Safari preferences > Privacy > Manage Website Data > Remove All).
One troubleshooting step yielded a clue: I created a new user profile for my Mac in System Preferences, logged into that user, declined to sign into iCloud, and then launched Safari. Safari worked normally there, suggesting that there was a problem specifically with my Safari data in my Mac user profile, or possibly with my iCloud data.
I tried removing various files under ~/Library
that looked Safari-related, but no luck. (Unfortunately, most of the Safari troubleshooting pages that I’ve found were written for old versions of Safari, so the files they suggest trashing aren’t always where they claim.)
How can I fix this constant crashing?