MacOS – Safari not loading pages, other browsers doing fine

macosNetworksafari

I have an issue many seem to have: Safari 7.0.5 (and now 7.0.6) hangs when loading web pages whereas other browsers (Chrome, Firefox) work just fine. I've ran my tests on WiFi with two different routers as well as through iPhone tethering.

Here are the steps I have taken so far but the problem persists:

re-installed my MacBook Air completely with the latest image from the App Store
Reset Safari
Disabled extensions
Unchecked "Warn when visiting fraudulent website"
Unchecked "Stop plug-ins to save power"
In the Develop menu, checked "Disable caches"
In WiFi settings, disabled IPv6
Changed DNS to OpenDNS
Deleted all Safari plist, caches, favicons cache, etc.
Turned off Safari in iCloud settings
Fixed permissions, rebooted
Disabled the prefetch setting from terminal
Emptied all my logs, launched Safari and tried to open this url: https://pragprog.com/login . Here is the (anonymised) result:

20/08/14 17:12:05.179 ubd[178]: ApplePushService: Timed out making blocking call, failed to perform call via XPC connection to 'com.apple.apsd'
20/08/14 17:12:05.681 AOSPushRelay[252]: ApplePushService: Timed out making blocking call, failed to perform call via XPC connection to 'com.apple.apsd'
20/08/14 17:12:05.909 parentalcontrolsd[271]: StartObservingFSEvents [849:] -- *** StartObservingFSEvents started event stream
20/08/14 17:12:06.112 UserEventAgent[11]: Captive: CNPluginHandler en0: Authenticated
20/08/14 17:12:06.513 accountsd[212]: /SourceCache/Accounts/Accounts-336.9/ACDAuthenticationPluginManager.m - -[ACDAuthenticationPluginManager credentialForAccount:client:handler:] - 230 - The authentication plugin for account “myname@gmail.com" (20DDC449-9F11-4479-8D9C-11BBC43D96AD) could not be found!
20/08/14 17:12:06.514 accountsd[212]: /SourceCache/Accounts/Accounts-336.9/ACDAccountStore.m - __62-[ACDAccountStore credentialForAccountWithIdentifier:handler:]_block_invoke389 - 857 - No plugin provides credentials for account myname@gmail.com. Falling back to legacy behavior.
20/08/14 17:12:06.668 com.apple.time[148]: Interval maximum value is 946100000 seconds (specified value: 9223372036854775807).
20/08/14 17:12:06.708 com.apple.NotesMigratorService[272]: Joined Aqua audit session
20/08/14 17:12:06.784 gamed[215]: CKSoftwareMap: Registering with Daemon
20/08/14 17:12:06.922 soagent[188]: No active accounts, killing soagent in 10 seconds
20/08/14 17:12:06.925 soagent[188]: No active accounts, killing soagent in 10 seconds
20/08/14 17:12:08.771 login[276]: USER_PROCESS: 276 ttys000
20/08/14 17:12:14.115 apsd[99]: Failed to evaluate trust: No error. (0), result=5; retrying with revocation checking optional
20/08/14 17:12:16.041 login[276]: DEAD_PROCESS: 276 ttys000
20/08/14 17:12:17.915 soagent[188]: Killing soagent.
20/08/14 17:12:17.916 NotificationCenter[175]: SOHelperCenter main connection interrupted
20/08/14 17:12:17.916 com.apple.dock.extra[183]: SOHelperCenter main connection interrupted
20/08/14 17:12:17.917 NotificationCenter[175]: SOHelperCenter main connection interrupted
20/08/14 17:12:17.919 imagent[194]: [Warning] Denying xpc connection, task does not have entitlement: com.apple.private.icfcallserver  (soagent:188)
20/08/14 17:12:17.919 imagent[194]: [Warning] Denying xpc connection, task does not have entitlement: com.apple.private.icfcallserver  (soagent:188)
20/08/14 17:12:21.911 Dropbox[210]: ICARegisterForEventNotification-Has been deprecated since 10.5.  Calls to this function in the future may crash this application.  Please move to ImageCaptureCore
20/08/14 17:12:23.437 com.apple.SecurityServer[15]: Session 100006 created
20/08/14 17:12:24.189 apsd[99]: Unrecognized leaf certificate
20/08/14 17:12:39.791 apsd[99]: Unrecognized leaf certificate
20/08/14 17:13:48.016 apsd[99]: Failed to send activation record to service com.apple.ManagedClient.enroll

I also deleted all the passwords in my keychain, deleted all the bookmarks and emptied the reading list, just in case there was some corruption there. Still no success. I tried to log in with the guest account as well but the problem is the same.

Best Answer

By verifying the issue in the Guest user you have identified the issue resides in a system shared resource. Attempt to reproduce the issue in Safe Mode. If the issue is not reproducible, reboot normally and check if the issues persist. If it does I would encourage you to backup your system and navigate over to the local Library located at /Library. From here you can start troubleshooting by removing files from locations such as:

./StartupItems
./LaunchAgents
./LaunchDaemons
./Internet Plug-ins

Reboot your system and attempt to reproduce after each change. If all else fails you may be looking at an erase and install of your OS and selective migrating your data back on to the drive to avoid migrating the issue over.

Hope this helps!

Related Solutions

Safari acting weird. Not loading pages and showing some Chinese text

The characters you posted are what you get if you take the text at the bottom of this post, encode it as UTF-8, and then (mistakenly) decode it as UTF-16BE.

Ultimately, Safari is decoding the data incorrectly (it should be decoded as UTF-8, but it is being decoded as UTF-16BE). It might do this for any one of several reasons:

The server incorrectly told Safari to decode as UTF-16BE (e.g. via a charset parameter in the Content-Type header of the server’s HTTP response).
The server incorrectly prepended a UTF-16BE BOM before the UTF-8 data.
Safari is configured to default to UTF-16BE.
I am not sure how this would be actually be accomplished though. The only UTF entry in the manual encoding list^† is “Unicode (UTF-8)”, which would seem to preclude forcing UTF-16BE (unlike TextEdit where you can actually select UTF-16BE, if you customize its list of encodings).
Safari auto-detected the encoding incorrectly.

Your particular problem seems likely to be a server (or proxy^‡) problem since you say that it is only happening intermittently.

The Network tab of Safari’s Web Inspector can show you the server response headers (to confirm or deny an erroneous charset parameter), but it would be probably be annoying to always have to remember to open/enable it for each tab you open (to capture the information it must already be active before when the page of interest is loaded—which may be difficult to predict if your problem is intermittent).

A packet capture could identify an erroneous BOM (and/or an erroneous charset), but such tools are much less convenient (also usually useless for encrypted (HTTPS) requests). If you know that the problem occurs fairly often, you might be able to send many requests through curl and try to identify erroneous BOMs/charsets by looking at the data it can report (server response headers and the raw content bytes).

^†You can manually choose an encoding (in Safari 5.1) via the View menu’s Text Encoding submenu.
^‡Such a proxy might be a “transparent” proxy that you might not otherwise suspect.

<!-- LOCALIZERS: Each localizable piece of the page is marked with a comment -->

<HTML>
<!-- LOCALIZERS: If in a right-to-left locale, add dir="rtl" to the HTML element. -->
<HEAD>
    <LINK rel=stylesheet type="text/css" href="page-load-errors.css">
    <!-- LOCALIZERS: You might want to change the font family. You can also add styles to override sizes, etc. -->
    <STYLE>
        BODY {font-family:'Helvetica Neue';}
    </STYLE>

    <!-- LOCALIZERS: The next line contains the page title that appears in the window's title bar -->
    <TITLE>Не вдалося відкрити сторінку</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
<div class="error-container">
<div class="icon" alt="Safari Icon"></div>
<div class="text-container">
<!-- main title here, repeated 3 times -->
<P class="error-title error-text-engraving">%@ <A id="help-button"></a></P>
<P class="error-title error-text">%@ <A id="help-button"></a></P>
<P class="error-title error-text-inner-shadow">%@ <A id="help-button" class="%@" HREF='open-help-anchor:%@'></a></P>
</div>
<div class="text-container">
<!-- error message here, repeated 3 times -->
<P class="error-message error-text-engraving">%@</P>
<P class="error-message error-text">%@</P>
<P class="error-message error-text-inner-shadow">%@</P>
</div>
</div>
</BODY>

</HTML>

Google translation suggests that the Cyrillic <title> text seems to be Ukrainian for “Could not open page”.

The comments indicated that this text only started showing up after a software update from Apple. The exact update was probably the 10.7.3 update which added localization for several languages, including Ukrainian.

I do not have a 10.7 system, but the above content (apart from the Ukrainian <title> text) is largely identical to the content of files from 10.6 (Safari 5.1.3) with names like /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/*.lproj/StandardErrorPage.html; all these files (on 10.6 Safari 5.1.3) are UTF-16LE encoded with a leading (UTF-16LE) BOM. This points strongly to the second possible reason I described: the “server” (actually just a local file) is supplying content with an incorrect BOM.

If you can identify the file used for your particular localization, you can probably “fix” it. As a guess, the Ukrainian file is probably something like …/ua.lproj/StandardErrorPage.html.

Note: Modifying this file might break Safari’s “code signature”. On 10.6, the English version of this file is listed in the …/Safari.app/Contents/_CodeSignature/CodeResources file as “optional”, so it might be okay (I have not tried it). If you do try editing/replacing the file, make a backup first! To be safe, you could make a copy of the whole Safari.app folder.

You can use a hex editor (e.g. HexFiend) to adjust the leading BOM bytes. If you are actually dealing with a file that starts with (hex) FE FF (UTF-16BE BOM) and is followed by UTF-8 encoded data (i.e. the following bytes are for <!-- LOCALIZERS: without NUL (hex 00) bytes between the characters), then you can probably just delete the first two bytes (Safari should then be able to auto-detect the content as UTF-8). Alternatively you could replace the leading, two-byte sequence FE FF with the three-byte sequence EF BB BF (i.e. the UTF-8 encoding of U+FEFF).

You can practice on a copy of the file if you want to try out the result before replacing the file that Safari actually uses. Just copy the file to your desktop (or wherever), hex edit that copy, then open it with Safari. After making the correct modifications (and reloading the page) you should see the Ukrainian title in the title bar and several lines of %@ in the page itself (instead of the old page of Chinese/Korean/etc. characters).

Hopefully, Apple will fix all this in some new Safari/Lion update.

ICloud – Reading List in other browsers

All reading list is a simple wrapper around bookmarks, that allows you quick access to both add and remove entries. It's usefulness stops there really, and the matter of convenience boils down to what you want to use the stored pages for, and how you wish to access them. If you are just using the same computer and will always have a net connection, then yes it's very convenient, but if you want to have them stored offline and synced to multiple devices, then it's not so useful.

I don't use Chrome, but I would probably look to get an extension for either Pocket/Readability/Instapaper to mimic the reading list feature, by making your recently stored pages available from a toolbar button rather than having to login to the respective sites. This gives you all the added benefits of using a proper 'service', with the instant nature of a quick bookmark system. A quick search for "instapaper" yielded 50 results on the Chrome extension store thing

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Safari acting weird. Not loading pages and showing some Chinese text

ICloud – Reading List in other browsers

Related Question