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Web pages crash all the time in Safari on iPhone

This page encountered a problem. Or a problem repeatedly occurred. All. The. Time. Zooming makes it worse/happen faster. Other times, just going to sites triggers this. it has been happening for years and it has become maddening. This kind of a bug is honestly just inexcusable at this point and and anyone working on Safari should be ashamed to have their name associated with the product it works like a third world space exploration program.


I have the latest iOS 16.4.1. I always update and install the latest versions. I’ve cleared history and cache and everything else I can think of. Ot happens on different iPhones that are also different models. This one is a 13 Pro. The only “pro” in Safari is how profoundly often pages won’t render. Other browsers don’t have these problems. Only Safari, you know, the browser that comes with the phone and is developed by Apple who also developed said phone it should run well on.


And while I’m at it, scrolling sites with ads often causes text to not display at all after a certain point. it really makes my day when I scroll past an ad on a page and then can scroll infinitely more while only seeing a blank page background until I reload the page and lose my place (no, it doesn’t).


[Re-Titled By Moderator]

iPhone 13 Pro

Posted on May 5, 2023 7:19 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 11, 2024 11:00 PM

The only app I experience issues with is Safari - and it's almost every webpage I use now. I've done all the steps, but they don't work. I can see I’m clearly not the only person having this issue.

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52 replies

May 7, 2024 9:07 AM in response to sypoltsystems

My safari was crashing and up-scrolling while I was mid-read in a news articles and resetting webpages repeatedly until I got the message about “safari has encountered repeated errors”…..the way I finally stopped it was to turn off “Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement” in Safari advanced settings. All the glitching nonsense was gone instantly and completely. I don’t know enough about software and coding to be able to say what is wrong, but my best logical guess is that the error is on Apple’s end not the phone or the websites fault.

And off topic: I was a Samsung user for a decade and I switch to iPhone for my kids and I have regretted every single moment. I feel like the iPhone is stepping back to the days of dial up internet service where every program glitched, and each machine was incompatible with all other machines and any task took forever. While Samsungs are fast, efficient and compatible with any and all other devices except iPhones.

THAT IS SIMPLY MY OPINION.

May 24, 2024 1:58 PM in response to Dogcow-Moof

This is interesting. How could one possibly know that “tens of millions of people use Safari on their iPhones daily without any crashing issues whatsoever?” I would argue that a small number of people stumbling into this discussion forum and taking the time to type out this complaint in detail likely conveys a widespread issue. The lack of vocal or written complaint from the majority of users would not be evidence of proper functioning in any scenario, but complaints of crashing from a few hundred users would certainly be evidence of a potential trend at the least. Imagine if NHTSA applied your logic to recalls for safety concerns on vehicles. “So what that 45 people driving this type of car have been in accidents where their airbags didn’t deploy? We haven’t heard anything about an issue from the other 15,000 vehicle owners. It’s clearly operator error…”

May 2, 2024 6:10 PM in response to sypoltsystems

This is definitely on Apple to fix. I noticed the issue possibly as far back as iOS 15. I notice that it happens on pages that load a lot of ads or have long-running JavaScript in the background. Web pages that heavily track users are more prone to crashing as well.


I'm fairly certain this is related to browser protections fighting against webpages. It could be stopping tracking scripts that are reloading and causing an error when they are stopped abruptly.


We'll have to wait on an update from Apple.

Jul 6, 2024 5:46 PM in response to sypoltsystems

I encountered persistent issues and contacted Apple Support multiple times. We went through extensive troubleshooting:


  1. Verified latest iOS
  2. Restarted device
  3. Enabled JavaScript
  4. Turned off Private Relay
  5. Disabled Spoken Content
  6. Turned off iCloud Safari syncing
  7. Disabled VPN settings
  8. Uninstalled VPN app
  9. Performed a clean iOS install


Despite these steps, the problem persisted. Finally, we disabled Safari extensions, which resolved the issue.

Aug 18, 2024 11:00 PM in response to sypoltsystems

Not just a problem with Safari. As others have noted, all WebKit browsers have this problem.


On Safari, I read articles from The Guardian. Any sufficiently long article (e.g. restaurant review with comments) is guaranteed to crash multiple times, and then to reload at the top of the article, forcing me to re-open the comments each time, and scroll down to where I was marooned.


I have been reading The Atlantic on the Google browser (no tabs, single document only) until recently, had to bail when a single (rather long) article crashed every 15s or so. (At least that reloaded near where I left off.)


Switching from Google to Firefox a couple days ago did not help, not as crashy as the original long article, but crashes continue.


Gotta Point the finger of blame squarely at WebKit.

Jul 8, 2024 1:08 PM in response to sypoltsystems

I'm a software developer, made a web-playable game that works pretty much everywhere except in my iphone 13, which throws that error.

This iphone 13 has ios 17.5.1. My wife's iphone 12 with the same ios version fails with the same error.

But... I have an iphone 10 with 16.7.8 and my game works fine.

So, it is something Apple added in an update, possibly starting with ios 17.

Perhaps some lock so heavy web stuff doesn't ruin hardware performance?


Feb 13, 2024 11:53 PM in response to rayloricred183

First, that's not the norm - tens of millions of people use Safari on their iPhones daily without any crashing issues whatsoever.


Second, the APIs used by Safari, known as WebKit, are the basis of all web browsers on iOS.


Other web browsers are just different graphical shells and handle bookmarks and cookies differently but still use the underlying WebKit APIs.


WebKit | Apple Developer Documentation


If you still see regular crashes using Safari, I highly recommend you make an appointment to have your phone examined, it's most likely a hardware memory issue with your device:


Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple



May 5, 2023 9:09 PM in response to sypoltsystems

If you are experiencing any difficulty with third-party apps or a specific website then please contact the app developer or site publisher/host directly. Here is how



Web pages crash all the time in Safari on iPhone

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