Safari still crashing after update?

A number of people have complained about Safari often crashing on their systems. While Apple's latest Safari update (5.0.1) is supposed to address some stability issues with the program,  a number of people are complaining of crashes. Here are some things you can try to hopefully clear these problems.

General maintenance
There are some general maintenance routines you can run both on Safari and on the system to help clear problems. In Safari, try clearing cookies and caches, among other items in the "Reset Safari" option in the Safari menu. You can also run general maintenance on your system to clear user account and system caches that could be contributing to the problem.

Adobe Flash
Since installing Safari 5, I have had numerous crashes that were Flash-related. You can see this when Flash and Adobe are referenced among the functions being run in the crashed thread in the crash report.

Try removing Flash from the /Macintosh HD/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ folder to see if that helps. After that, if you need Flash, you can install the latest version from Adobe's Web site.

You may also benefit from using a Flash-blocking utility such as Click2Flash that will disable Flash components on Web pages unless you specifically enable them.

In addition to flash, if you have other plug-ins that you've installed, you might try uninstalling or updating them. Be sure they have been tested with your version of Safari before ruling them out as a cause for the crashes, and also be sure to manually troubleshoot them (remove them one-by-one and relaunch and test Safari each time you do this).

Input  managers
Third-party input managers--Saft, Inquisitor, PithHelmet, SafariStand, and so on--can also cause crashes in Safari. Try either updating them or removing them from the system. They should be located in one of the following folders, but you should use an uninstaller if one is available.

/username/Library/Input Managers

/Macintosh HD/Library/Input Managers

/Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support

A commonly used input manager is SIMBL, which may load numerous plug-ins that may also be contributing to the crashes, so be sure to test them as well. We recently wrote an article on managing SIMBL with Safari 5.0.

Clear preferences
In addition to using Safari's "Reset" feature, you may be having problems a corrupt Safari's preferences file. Locate the file "com.apple.Safari.plist" in the /username/Library/Preferences/ folder and remove it. When you relaunch Safari, it will recreate the file. (Keep in mind custom settings in Safari's preferences will be reverted to default after doing this).

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