Applications unexpectedly quitting when waking from sleep (#2): Fixes

CNET staff

Sept. 2, 2009 6:56 a.m. PT

3 min read

Last week's report on a problem where some open applications unexpectedly quit in a repeatable fashion when the system is awoken from sleep drew tremendous response, with dozens of readers corroborating the issue.

The applications most likely to suffer from this issue are Web browsers -- Safari in particular -- though others have also been noted.

Some users are associating the crashes with Mac OS X 10.4.6, though the update almost certainly isn't the cause in all cases. MacFixIt reader Greg Jones writes:

"I am experiencing the same issue with Safari (latest version of Safari, OS 10.4.6) on my PowerBook G4. I have never had any of the prior issues with waking from sleep.

Terry Ford adds:

"I too am finding that virtually every time my Mac wakes from sleep, Safari and or Firefox will crash. I?ve not had any app other than a browser exhibit this and these are the only two browsers I ever run.

"If I remember correctly, this did not start with the 10.4.6 update but sometime after that. I suspect one of the supporting updates may be the cause.

"I have not been able to actually confirm this as yet but it seems that the only time Safari doesn't crash when waking from sleep is if it were the front active application when my Mac went to sleep. There have been a few times it didn?t crash when waking and the only thing I've noticed differently is it being the active app after waking."

Fixes

Check your version of Flash player Some readers made use of our recently published tutorial "An introduction to reading Mac OS X crash reports", inspecting their Safari crash (~user/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Safari.crash.log) reports to look for a component implicated in these unexpected quits.

In many cases, users found that Adobe Flash Player (formerly from Macromedia) plug-in to be the cause.

MacFixIt reader William Kucharski writes:

"I looked in my Safari crash logs and found the same issue each time - a NULL pointer dereference from the Macromedia Flash plugin.

"I went to the Adobe Web Site, clicked the 'Get Macromedia Flash Player' button and downloaded and installed the latest version of Flash Player (8.0 r24.)

"I haven't had a crash on wake in Safari since."

As we previously noted, Adobe released a beta version of Flash Player 8.5, which may be causing the problems. Intel-based Macs require version 8.0r27 which is available as a standalone download, while users of other Macs should use the standard download link for Flash player rather than the beta release if experiencing this issue.

Clear caches Some users have been able to solve this issue in Safari and other browsers by using a utility like Cocktail to clear Internet caches.

One reader writes:

"I too had this problem. Repeatedly. Finally, I ran Cocktail to clean internet caches and all is well."

Delete Safari .plist file The tried and true workaround of deleting .plist files has proved successful in this case.

Try deleting the com.apple.Safari.plist (for Safari) or org.mozilla.firefox.plist (for Firefox) from ~/Library/Preferences (the tilde [~] represents your home user directory) then re-launching your browser.