Update: Has Safari stopped crashing?
At times when I’m surfing the web on iPhone’s Safari browser, it crashes and takes me back to the home screen. Safari hasn’t crashed as frequently on my new replacement iPhone compared to my old one, but the fact that it has happened on both makes me wonder how widespread the problem is.
On my old iPhone I performed a restore through iTunes and the problem was minimized but not completely eliminated.
I was surprised to see the Safari browser crashing on my new phone starting about last week. There are certain scenarios when it’s most likely to happen:
- Safari crashes when I’ve got the iPod playing in the background while I’m browsing.
- Safari crashes when I’ve got 4 or more tabs open. Maybe the iPhone gets overloaded and that’s why it crashes, but it doesn’t happen while I’m using any app other than Safari.
- Safari crashes sometimes when I’m entering text into a text field.
It rarely happens when I’m browsing with one or two tabs open and the iPod is off.
I did a search on Google and found that iPhone’s Safari crashing problem is not all that uncommon. Ed Shull posted about it back in July and has received 66 replies, many from people who have experienced the same problem.
Phil Windley has a post on fixing Safari crashes by rebooting your iPhone — he says holding the home and power buttons down for 10 seconds does the trick. I tried this and Safari hasn’t crashed since then, but I think it’s still too soon to tell.
Update (Feb. 4): Safari continues to crash on me. Just now I was browsing (on a WiFi network) with two tabs open and listening to the iPod, and Safari crashed 3 times in 10 minutes. I came to update this post on my iPhone while still using the iPod app and Safari crashed another two times.
Now that I turned the iPod off it hasn’t crashed. It seems the problem is largely related to browsing while simultaneously using the iPhone’s iPod application.
Does Safari crash on your iPhone? Please share your experience in the comments.
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as for me it seems to crash ONLY if i go to any google related website.
all the rest of pages seems to work
exept they host any google code
It appears that this bug came with latest version of Safary Download manager 1.5.
So if you will uninstall it Safary will start working again. The other fix is to click “download” icon and then press “done”. You will need to do this any time your safary will stop responding till new vertion of Safary Download manager will fix that bug. Watch video on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVZ_a74fCUw
Give these a try:
http://appletoolbox.com/2010/0.....hes-fixes/
My Safari – iPhone, 3GS since the latest upgrade – crashes whenever I type into the address bar. Almost always on the second letter I type… guaranteed after typing T & F
Without fail. The keyboard freezes for a while, then Safari closes. Infuriating. Any suggestions other than rebooting – doesn’t help!
Thank you. this is very helpful. I can now use my Safari browser again.
Wow thank you very much, actually I didnt even know about the home+power button, worked great for me. Now let’s just hope it will be fine.
My safari crashes about twice a week. I downloaded the Mercury browser app as a backup. Works great.
wow I have the same problem. When I first got this phone it Rarely ever crashed, now it happens EVERY time I go on it. I have an unlocked iPhone and this Really Really posses me off. It’s been happening more and more often and sometimes I’m ready to chuck the phone at the wall. I’ll try to update to whatever version I can use that’s most recent for this unlocked version and see it it solves the problem. I need to restart my phone more than once a day because I get knocked off and it freezes in safari all the time as well. Sucks
Hi All,
I bought iphone 3gs two days back, was trying to understand diff options but suddenly safari screen blacked out, i was not able to see any thing, so i checked in google and as suggested by Phil ,i restarted iphone and it started working back. But this is just a temp solution for browser crash, can some shed more light on this.
Regards,
Amit Parashar
Tried rebooting and emptying my cache and history. Still crashes. It is always when I am on my news sites such as clickondetroit.com. Mine crashes repeatedly several times per day with only one tab open. Rarely use mire than one tab. Nothing else (iPod or other) is running in the background.
Extremely annoying. Count me among those who wish I never bought this thing. This problem alone will keep me from ever buying another iPhone.
It just happened … that’s why I found your page, to look for a fix. It just went blank, black blank.
Thanks a lot. Yesterday(3 apr ’10) i experienced the safari crash on my month old ipod 3GS.
The fix (rebooting by holding sleep and home buttons for 10 seconds) was very useful. Did the job.
wow – great fix for safari on my Ipod touch – thanks!
worked first time
A few days back Safari crashed on me, it was the first time and I didn’t realise what had happened, only that I had a blank screen and that no amount of clearing cookies and cache etc would help.
I googled the problem and came across this site, with the recommendation to reboot the iPhone (I hadn’t realised one could reboot the iPhone before) and my problem was resolved in a trice.
U should also add, clear you history, cache and cookies often. This I believe adds to the 10mb. Not sure tho
Hey it happens to me when I have 10mb opened in safari. I think the iPhone is limited to how big of a web page it can read. So in theory 2 pages or 6 pages if there over 10mb it will crash. I have tested this with various PDFs and text documents
I have had my iPhone for 7 month, iPhone 3g 8gb.
I have to say that safari is the best function on it, I use 400mb a week for business reasons browsing.
My safari has never crashed untill today and that’s because I hard restarted it and when I launched safari and opened google from my favorite it crashed 10 times, I fixed it by restarting five times etc.
Works perfect for me:)
If you jail break your iPhone you screw it up.