Safari hangs and Lion Crashes

Question

Hi,
I was borwsing the web in my MacBook Pro using Safari 5.1. I was composing a email on Gmail when the colorful spinwheel appeared. I let the spinwheel to run for about 45 seconds before attempting a Force Quit. Since Safari did not get out of its spinwheel (hang), I then went to the Apple Menu and opened up the "Force Quit" menu, I selected Safari and proceeded to force quit the progam. This is where things got wierd, after force quitting Safari, the whole system became unresponsive, I was not able to make any selections on the Apple Menu. However the most bizzare part of the issue was that the cursor still moved but nothing was selectable on screen, so I decided to make a key combination (cmd+option+power button) to make a force restart (I don't like the forced restart method where the user presses the power button for more than 5 seconds, I am told that the key combination of forced restart allows the EFI to reset the whole system).
Has anyone experienced such symptoms when using Safari?, Is this a common issue?
Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

Lion in it's current released form ( 10.7.1 ) has lots of strange glitches and Safari is a memory hogging performance killer. If you open Activity Monitor with Safari open adn browsing like you usually do, then you will notice two connected processes : Safari itself and "Safari webcontent" , these two can also be accompanied by the evil Flash plugin of course.
"Webcontent" is new in v5.1 and is a sandboxing around any open website, a security "firewall" for the web - if a website has malware that wants to sneak via Safari into your Harddisk, then the webcontent process will forbid that.  Safari ( as all apps and the OS itself ) in Lion runs by default in 64bit usermode mode, making things even worse, because the App has unlimited access to the physically available RAM ( memory ), so if Safari goes crazy due to some websites, it can occupy every ressource in Mac OSX so bad that the rest of the OS becomes unresponsive. Because 64bit Browser will also need 64bit plugins, and as we all know that flash on its own is itself ressource intense, you might imagine what happens if such "webprocesses" have embedded flash movies in them ..
So, momentary tragically this mix of 64bit computing and the security sandboxing model leads to all sort of issues, including memory leaks and hangs ( not only in Safari , but it is a number one source for that ) .
You can limit the available memory, this cures some issues = run Safari in 32bit mode. This will also force the flash plugin to 32bit mode, making it more ressource friendly ( to some degree at least ) .
Reveal Safari in your application folder, right click "get info" and checkmark "run in 32bit compatibility mode".
To avoid having the flash plugin active all the time ( or to play videos in Quicktime ) , I recommend the safari extension "click to flash" ( free ) installable via safari's Settings Menu. Only movies that you want to see will then play ( after you click them, as the name implies ) - this limits memory usage of Safari, too.
A befriended developer who has already the final version of 10.7.2 update swears that it cures virtually all existing Lion and Safari issues. It should be available on or before October 12 together with iCloud and iOS5 and the new iTunes . Apple reveled oct 12 as the introduction date for their new line of apps and iCloud, and because 10.7.2 integrates all these needed stuff for it to work, it must come out the very same day or even before. ( this is no "Speculation" which is "forbidden to discuss here" -- it's a simple matter of fact , watch the last keynote held by Apple CEO Cook where they introduce iphone4s - it has all the infos )
So. only 2 days left maximum, then we all be happy I guess
Message was edited by: Sjazbec