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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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Safari freezes when I am in eBay and go once in a while sometimes it’s rampat when I keep trying to do the same search etc
it’s been with two different 3 g phones and Now with my 3gs phone and my 3 gs replacement it us definitly widespread
Yes mine crashes alot. iPhone 3g on 3.0. Has crashed about ten times tonight. And I thought apple never have any of these issues. My eBay app does the same. will just close and go to the home screen. I give up sometimes.
http://www.wsj.com
Crashes all the time….
I can’t wait for Flash support, that’s not going to help matters….
I’m thinking of dumping it !
Jb
Mine is now crashing all the time. I just tried it with the ipod not playing anything and had the same problem. What the hell? lol
Lets see in the 3 weeks that Ive owned the Iphone: Safari repeatedly freezes up and is uselss until I restart the phone, voicemail is ‘unavialable’, ‘no sim card’, ‘no phone service’,,,I’d keep going but im starting to get depressed.
But I do have some great fart applications!! Hurray!!
What a junk. I should have gotten another blackberry. The network was slower but at least the phone worked.
My safari crashes when I’m on intense websites. Websites that have a lot of galleries and such. Then when I try to close a window it freezes up. This last time was the worst. It froze and for a minute had nothing but the time bar and a black screen. I may try a restore. It’s been happening often. I do NOT have the iPod going at the same time as you have.
Still crashing just download the super search app.
Then go to google to get the web page you desire
this app works and connection travels fast in my experience
Still crashing alright ! I just got this phone for my
birthday back in June so here's how
I circle around this I downloaded supersearch
application, from there I go to google
and just get the webpage I want & proceed until
Safari gets it act together
I have owned an iPhone for about 2 weeks now. Within the last few days Safari has been crashing while trying to access Google Finance – particularly when I attempt to view a particular stock (symbol). I disabled Java and TADA! No crashes! Now i will see how limited my browsing experience will be without it. Go figure.
[...] is normal for the iphone. http://www.appleiphonereview.c.....i-crashes/ Its happened since firmware 1.0 and apple has not payed any attention to it. theres nothing you can [...]
Try the app mentioned above. I informs you how much free memory is available, if it is a small amount you can then free it up and increase it. This stops the crashing!
Tc
My Iphone crashes when page is not completely loaded
Webpages marketwatch.com moneycontrol.com crshes
No iPod or other apps running
there is an app called ‘Free Memory’. With one click it clears the memory cache. Itvalso tells you how much static memory you have available at a paticular time. Give it a go. I think its free.
Tc
I agree about the Java and database intensive websites. My itouch crashes pretty regularly on specific sites that I go to. For instance, my homepage is SFGate. Com. This site crashes pretty regularly but not all the time. My theory is that certain ads that are being pulled cause it to crash. This doesn’t matter if I have one tab open or six, once I get to a Java intensive website, if I don’t wait for everything to load completely, it will almost surely crash.
I also had a theory that it did not crash prior to me installing some huge apps on my itouch, this kinda went along with the memory usage theory.
So far it’s been 99.9% perfect, the only thing that has crashed it is an extremely large and Javascript heavy page (about 2MB of HTML and JS code) I wrote some years back for a customer. Everything else has been perfectly stable even on really large sites like IGN.com. So I’m quite happy to consider this problem fixed!
It seems better for me with the new 2.2.1 firmware. Photoboy, how is it for you?
I see a new firmware is out: 2.2.1. It claims to improve Safari stability, but I think 2.2 claimed that as well, so we’ll have to see. I’ll make sure to come back here and report on how well it works after a few days of heavy usage.
About the crashes. It is clear that it is almost always caused by Safari using too much memory.
1) Reboot the ipod (hold the top button for 5 seconds). This removes any resident programs from memory that may have been spawned by an app.
2) If you have jailbroken your iPod: Disable anything resident. For example, scrobbled, a nifty app to scrobble songs in the background takes up 12 of my 128M of memory. Disabling SSH can help (but not much). Winterboard takes up a good amount of memory. Disabling this can help. In short, DON’T JAILBREAK YOUR PHONE unless you know wtf your doing.
3) Reduce the amount of web pages.
4) Delete cookies from settings menu.
5) Deal with it. Sadly, even doing all of the above won’t stop a page with heavy jscrpting from crashing your Safari.
My browser crashed multiple times daily. I have tried deleting cache, reset, shutdown, memory freeing app. Nothing seems to work I am on firmware 2.2 btw.
Mine crashes every couple of days. I look for a pattern but just can’t find one.
Every time I’d go on myspace or facebook the iPhone would crash. So I deleted the cookies and everything in safari then reset the phone it was fine for a few than started again .what’s the problem?
As far as I know, no-one is talking about this problem. I’d have thought at least one of the tech sites would have picked up on this and started making a noise about it by now. I don’t think returning your phone for a replacement will help, it really seems to be a software rather than hardware problem unfortunately.
It’s pretty bad O2 are just telling people to reboot, as that’s not a real fix it just masks the problem for a bit. All rebooting does is free up some memory for a while to make it seem like it’s fixed.
I’ve noticed very big/complex pages or Javascript heavy pages tend to be the ones that cause crashes the most often. For example, the badly written homepage to IGN.com causes my iPhone to crash regularly. Kotaku.com and the various icanhascheezburger.com sites also tend to cause frequent crashes.
Apple never acknowledge faults in their products if they can help it, so I wouldn’t expect them to talk about this problem. For now all we can hope for is that the tech press actually pick up on this problem and start making a noise about it. If there is enough bad press Apple will have to get off its arse and start fixing it.
My Safari used to crash a lot particularly on the Facebook site. But now I view Facebook through the Facebook application it doesn’t happen much.
It’s one of those things.
Tc
Ive had my iphone 3g for about 3 weeks now and safari crashes at least once a day, i phoned O2 who said to do a reboot by holding the home button and on/off button but it hasnt made any difference, should i bother sending my phone back to get a replacement or is there not much point since everyone seems to be experiencing this problem. Has Apple actually acknowledged these problems????
I have started having frequent crashes of late. Noticed that it crashes on certain kinds of web pages. For example it crashes on the google finance site. I dont think it has crashed on sites designed for the web such as cnn and reuters. Also, it crashes when i expand web pages to increase text size to read them. These crashes are getting more and more frequent. I also suspect this might be linked to the apps that we download. i had faced this crashing problem with a air hockey game i had downloaded and had to remove it.
LIKE IT STURNS BLACK FOR 2 SECONDS AND THEN YOU THE HOME SCREEN ICONS
THE SAFARI CRASHES ON MY IPHONE ONCE A WEEK.
Ya I just bought the iPhone 3g from the at&t store upgrading, I’ve had it less than 3 weeks and as I’m traveling to see family it crashes alot. Yes it’s mostly when I have 4 to 5 tabs open doing multiple things but it’s very annoying and I have noticed that it gets kind of sluggish at times as well so it’s got to be a memory thing, I just cleared my cookies and all those temp stuff to see if it improves. Since I’ve added quite a few applications straight through the iphone, since I first got it so I have done a few hard resests for the applications to show up after I installed them.
Crashes all the bloody time.
Real pain the ass.
We early adoptors should singing Apple iPhone praises to our followers, and tell the truth. Maybe I should advise all my friends on iPhones draw!!
Yes, it has crashed probably 10 times now from initaly being on the internet and straight back to the home screen!
I’ve only had the phone for a week!!!
my fone crashes everday I only have one tab open and it still crashes. I don’t know what the problem it. This is my 3 iPhone and I have this problem everytime. It drives me crazy. I have restored my fone got the replacement phone everything. But the
problem is still there. Apple really need 2 figure this out and fast.
Mine crashes on occasion which I find really irritating. I’m using it at the moment though so it’s not all bad. What I find really strange is that in the old days Apple used these mass market appeal consumer goods like the iPod to showcase Apple products, but there are many things wrong with the iPhone that put me off Apple computers completely. You May argue that the iPhone is a Market leader in it’s field but let’s face it, phones are hardly well represented with impressive alternatives. In fact I think most of the main phone manufactures are to blame for the iPhone’s dominance by producing unimaginative poorly designed products.
There is always talk of an iPhone killer and Its only a matter of time before someone pulls their finger out and produces a true rival
I’ve noticed far less crashing lately after the big 2.2 update. It’s only crashed so far when I tried to open a YouTube blog page with 5,000 comments!
My Safari crashes all the time. At least 3 times a day. Doesn’t matter how many tabs I have open or if I have the ipod app running. Very frustrating. Newest OS version, 3G phone, I reboot it at least a couple times a week.
With 2.2 installed Safari now crashes every ten minutes or so and doesn’t return to the site it’s crashed on. But I’ve got street views and I can turn off predictive text; That makes me feel *so* much better. Useless piece of Apple cr*p.
After the 2.2 update, I thought the crashing was over. After about a week, however, they have returned with a vengence. I had 1 crash while listening to the iPod and that apparently opened the floodgates. Every five minutes or so it crashes. It is definitely a memory issue. Which is strange because I thought OSX is supposed to give apps all the resources available on the system…
yeah I have this problem with the safari crash too,and very poor 3G signal,had the phone replaced twice still the same problem,even replaced the sim,but no help,I am running on the 2.1,at the moment many people recomend updating on itunes to 2.2 software,they say it solves most common problems like bad signal for 3G or safari crashes,so I think I will give it a try,when I get me mac back from repair,not really sure if it safe to go to Internet caffee to download itunes and update my phone? Is it safe,any advice?
Version 2.1 – Safari crashes far too frequently. Re-booting on a regular basis is not a fix.
One day old iPhone, trying it out by browsing using wifi at a starbucks and it kept on crashing. wasn’t using iPod or any other app. Was browsing apple store searching for the reviews on apple’s Bluetooth headset. Everytime I type Bluetooth on the search line, it seems it tries to load the result page and then it crashes and takes me back to the homescreen. Today it kept on crashing again when I try AT&T website to find a the nearest store. Had to keep repeating the search because it keeps on crashing. Oh btw, on AT&T website when I’m typing the zip code the delete or back button doesn’t work. Had to reset the page. I got to this forum doing a search on safari crashes. And it crashed again while I was posting my comment. This is the second time I’m typing this after doing the iPhone reset and it seems like I’ll be able to post this now. Today is the 2nd day I’ve had this iPhone.
hi,
my 3g italian iphone crashes too;
it happens multiple time each day in wifi and 3g with cleared cache and after complete reboot
my iPhone 3g safari crashes 100% of the time. Just access WSJ.com and it crashes on the first page
Its not technically Safari’s fault.
Its the iPhone.
I dont think changing browsers will help.
Best thing to do is let the page fully load before you start typing (its invariably when you are on a forum that is crashes).
Tc
Hey guys ,
Well definitely the wishlist will go on.But for the Safari Crashes i found this new app useful. Its named MyFox …it didnt crash for me till now.Lets see.Try it.
Yes, mine crashes often, multiple times each day. When I called Apple just now for support, I was asked for an example of what I’m doing when it crashes. I said “checking Gmail”. Then I was grilled on why I am checking Gmail through the broswer instead of using the email app. “Jeez”, I said, “do I really have to explain it to you? And why should it matter. Safari crashes a lot during all sorts of various activities”.
They had me reset, clear the cookies, cache and history, and I’ll see if it improves. But I’m also calling ATT next and letting them know that if it continues I will return the phone and expect a refund. It’s not performing as advertised.
On my 20 minute train ride to work, safari will regularly crash twice. Some days (like today) it crashes 3 times in this time period. It also crashes in my apartment and it crashed in Europe.
Was having the same problem on wifi, edge and 3g (new iphone, only had it 3 weeks). Would crash after 40 seconds on anything, with nothin running in the background. Tried recommended reset, so far so good
Mt Safari crashes regularly, too. I’ve had the iPod music going into spasm repeat mode at the same time, needing a hard reset. Very bloody annoying! Perhaps the good news is my brother-in-law works on the production team of Today Tonight (a tabloid style current affairs TV show in Australia … very trashy, he admits, but strangely popular) and they are poised to do a story about the phenonomon in November … perhaps this might kick Apple into action.
I get Safari crashes VERY frequently – especially on Flickr. If I am typing that usually slows, freezes then a few seconds later – crash. Never had this issue with previous iPhone software releases
Safari crashes constantly on my 3G iPhone with version 2.1 software.
Apple are you listening!! These bugs tarnish an otherwise fine product.
P.S. Will a flash player ever be integrated into iPhone Safari? What a shame
Safari crashes on me regularly on my new (2 weeks old, latest firmware) iPhone 3g. Very annoying. I’ve tried the suggestions I’ve seen, including rebooting the iPhone and clearing the Safari cache. That didn’t help. I turned off support for Javascript and didn’t have any crashes for a short time, but browsing without javascript support is almost useless these days.
IMHO Apple really needs to fix this. They can’t replicate this problem and debug it? Just browse to news sites like Yahoo or what Google news points to. Crashes for me are quite frequent for those sites.