The last time I upgraded Safari, YouTube started crashing it. This came as a bit of a shock, as in my experience since I switched to Macs, they ‘just work’. Safari crashing on Flash is the first ‘issue’ I’ve had. (I changed YouTube to display HTML5, and that fixed the problem.)
So now there’s Safari 5. It’s not an automatic update as delivered in the past, but a free download from Apple. Has anyone installed Safari 5, and are there any ‘gotchas’ I need to be aware of?
I’m using it on two machines.
I haven’t noticed any particular issues yet (and it really doesn’t feel any different from 4). You might want to check out this forum: Safari 5 problems | MacRumors Forums
There seems to be a small but vocal set of people who are having issues.
Hm. Since Safari 4.0.5 is working (aside from occasionally losing the HTML5 setting for YouTube) and I’m on a five-year-old non-Intel machine, those comments are a bit worrisome. I do have my original discs, of course, as someone mentioned are needed to make Safari 5 run correctly, but it sounds as if I should stick with what I’ve got.
Thanks for the link.
Do you have some kind of Flash blocker, like Click To Flash, installed? I’ve had problems before when the browser was upgraded and consequently the Flash blocker didn’t work properly and caused all kinds of problems, including with YouTube.
I just installed click2flash. When I went to YouTube my browser crashed. I started it up and clicked on a random video, and the viewer was a black screen with ‘youtube’ in the middle. I figured out you have to right-click and tell it to open. Before that, I clicked on a different video and it opened with HTML5. Not sure if I like it yet.
In any case, the thread linked earlier sounds like Safari 5 has issues that I don’t want to deal with.
I didn’t download it, but I have it.
I think it came down with the Snow Leopard 10.6.4 update.
One thing you might try is downloading the latest Flash. There was a bit of a kerfluffle between Adobe and Apple because Apple shipped 10.6.4 with an older version of Flash.
When I was having Flash issues a few days ago, I checked the version I had (with the online version checker) and found it was an older version. I downloaded the latest version, and things seem to be running just peachy.
Looks like I had Flash 7. I’ve installed Flash 10.
I can’t use Snow Leopard, since I don’t have an Intel machine. One of these days I’ll get a MacBook Pro to replace this PowerBook G4. Can’t afford it right now, though.
One of the nice things about Safari 4 and Safari 5 is that now Flash is offloaded to a separate process outside of Safari itself, so when Flash crashes (and it will - it’s a bag of wank on Mac OS X due to Adobe) it will bring down that thread but not Safari as a whole. When they moved to this model my browser crashes went down by an order of magnitude.
If you want some of the much-too-late-but-finally improvements you can install the Flash 10.1 beta from Adobe. It has fixed some 4 year old performance bugs but it is still pretty poor. It’s better than nothing though.
Wow. That’s a really, really old version. YouTube only maintains compatibility with it to work with the Wii browser and similar devices. The thing is, that version of Flash 7 is slightly different from the PC version, which is slightly different from the Mac version. And I’ve had the PC version crash on Youtube. (It’s an old computer and Flash 7 is all it can handle.)
So what I’m saying is that it makes sense that Safari 5 would not have bothered to maintain compatibility with such an old, buggy version.