Solve an apparent 'stuck Safari' crash without losing work

Jun 29, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Frederico

Yes, I know, if you use haxies you get what you deserve. But to this day, Spotlight, enhanced custom keystrokes and all, and in spite of my overall hatred for the mouse versus a good keystroke combo, there are just a ton of things I find easier to do with a right-click and Contextual Menu action when I am in certain work (or leisure) modes, especially Web research and just plain surfing. But the price is getting higher.

Summary of this hint: I was having a spinning beacbhall hang issue in Safari. After some work, I figured out that it was caused by FruitMenu's contextual menu support. Temporarily disabling the contextual menu support -- without quitting or logging out -- instantly ended the Safari hang-up and I was able to start using it again without losing any work.

Read on if you'd like more background on the Safari problems I was having, and how I diagnosed and solved them...

Background: So since around 10.5.6, and the later versions of Safari 3, I started having frequent spinning beachballs of death (SBOD), and was having to force-quit Safari more often than I'd like. Even with Open all Tabs from Last Session to prevent the agony of trying to search through a week of History and bookmarks for what you had left open waiting to read, I would lose window placement, shading, position etc. Also, having to reload up to 100 tabs with previously-placed data for comparison shopping and reading and the like, getting it all back to where I had it totally sucked beans.

Safari 4 has been less-frequent in lock-ups, but the lock-ups were coming harder (if that makes any sense). In other words, whereas in Safari 3.x the jam would occasionally clear if I got up to get a drink or attend another task long enough to wait it out, Safari 4 stayed jammed up even if I went to lunch and back.

Finally, just tonight, my poor addled brain finally noted that the freezes were not very long after having accessed Contextual Menus for some thing or another. Also, I've been having incorrect display of one of Fruit Menu's nicer features, the display and sub-menu access to all local volumes, including mounted DMGs (very handy when you're downloading lots of DMGs and don't want to drop into Finder to access).

Well, this time when the SBOD hit me during an exceptionally long forum post creation, one that I had not copied to clipboard in a while for safety, and I was determined to save my unsaved text -- at least ten full paragraphs (more than twice the length of this overly-long hint).

In Terminal, I ran top -ocpu, which showed flashes of Unsanity-related activity. But it always did and always will; Application Enhancer is CPU-intensive and moreover incessant, like a swarm of gnats at a picnic by the lake. But make the picnic big enough with enough people (Mac Pro Quad), and you hardly notice them, and the food is so good that you will tolerate the gnats for the fish they attract. After a little top and a little ps -aux | grep to confirm, it became as simple as going into the Fruit Menu System Preferences panel, disabling Contextual Menu support, and hitting 'Apply'.

Boom, Safari came back to life instantly. My post was saved. As was my own unsanity. I turned the support back on, did a few more right-clicks inside a text entry form, and, whap!, Safari locked up. Turned it off, Safari is back. Obsessed with my discovery, I set out to reproduce, and reproduce I did.

This happens most often when entering text into a submit form, or doing text selections then something like Search in Google, and is triggered most often by spell check. The thing is that it takes several seconds after you've completed the contextual menu action for the lock-up to occur, so it was not an obvious vector to explore.

This is probably the cause for some freezes and outright crashes in other apps when I use the Contextual Menus there, too. I plan to submit a report to Unsanity (they really are pretty responsive developers), and see how much I can help them help me continue to love using their products.

I hope this helps someone else; just toggle various haxie features off, and you don't have to force-quit, quit, or even log out any more to resolve.

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