Apple's macOS 14.2 Release Aims to Finally Resolve Longstanding “Safari Not Responding” Bug While watchOS 10.2 and tvOS 17.2 Also Launch

Given that I don't think any of the bugs that caused you to rollback last time have been fixed. Is it just for the Safari Not Responding fix?

You're right, I am on latest Safari now, so SNR isn't a reason to upgrade.

A week or so ago, I recorded a QuickTime that showed how VO+J and the Web Rotor Headings menu work on Ventura. I want to record a similar video on Sonoma to show how the changes to those features have introduced issues, then submit the two videos as a bug report. If we don't tell Apple how disruptive it is for them to change VO+J behavior, they'll just continue arbitrarily changing it in release after release.

Personally, I am standing by my above statement; sticking with Ventura until next year's releases. Ventura will still receive updates until Q4 2025, so I am content with that.

Still, if your method of bug reporting will open the eyes of the powers that be, then have at it. 😎

As I mentioned previously, I upgraded Safari to 17.2, though I'm still on Ventura 13.6.1.

Sadly, I must confirm that Safari is Still Not Responding. First time I encountered it was while loading a sheet in Google Drive. Sometimes sheets load slow, so I wasn't sure that was actually an instance of this bug.

Then I ran into it while exploring Google Search results. Move to first item, select it, review the website, then Command+left bracket back to the results and, BOOM, Safari Not Responding.

If Apple has received all our sysdiagnose files and QuickTime videos--if Apple knows we can no longer recommend Apple hardware to our blind friends and associates, if Apple knows we're going to freeze buying new hardware until this issue is resolved--and they still can't fix it, then I'm unsure how to proceed.

Try Duck Duck Go. It is not perfect, but it is incredibly fast. There will still be 'SNR', or rather 'NR', but it is far less frequent than Safari. The privacy protection within and the simplistic media player for sites like YouTube has made DDG my current preferred browser on Mac. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Do we even know if it is supposed to be fixed in Ventura? It might be a system thing. I think since 14.2 I've only encountered the one Not Responding bug (even though it was a bad one). I had been getting little not responding issues all over the place - VO Utility, System Settings, the context menu in Mail etc. Maybe I've just been lucky but I've not noticed anything like that. So might be the fix either wasn't in Safari or needed something in the system too.

Or maybe it is just biding its time, who knows...

I'm simply going off the Safari release number 17.2, isn't that the version that ships with current Sonoma?

I did realize there might be an OS component to this fix. So I got rid of my Chimera and upgraded from 13.6.1 to 13.6.3. But Safari is still Not Responding in many cases. Those of you on Sonoma say that SNR is greatly reduced. On Ventura, the bug is as present as it ever was, which makes me wonder what the update was for.

Well, give me a few days, and I'll try Sonoma as I previously mentioned.

You've got to wonder why Apple can't just tell us when things are fixed. Is it because it's just too much effort for them? Or is it because admitting a fix is admitting a fault in the first place?

I presume the latest Safari comes in on a Ventura update? If I get some time I will install it on my Intel which is still running Ventura and see if I can log into Amazon, which I couldn't before 14.2 on either Sonoma or Ventura.

But good luck if you try Sonoma again. It's good you'll be submitting a bug report or two. I'm still unconvinced Apple will see the VO+J change as a bug. "Go to linked item" is quite vague, and I presume it is still going to some sort of linked item. I don't really know technically how it works. (I'm guessing some sort of aria-relates-to or some such?)

I'll also have to find the time to report the option+right bug now I've found it in Xcode too. It's just so time consuming, but the time would be a lot easier to come by if you knew it would make a difference.

So I am not the only one.
That’s what I was afraid of, that if I called Apple, they might ask me to delete and reset and install everything, to no avail I’m sure.
It happened as soon as I updated. I cannot get it back, no matter what I do. I ended up with a compact voice. I’d rather not keep Samantha. Any suggestions?

I'm not a mac user but has apple themselves said they aim to fix the issue? If not then I'd recommend changing the title.

A lot of peple will probably upgrade without reading this thread, after all, apple aims to fix this bug, I know I would, but to find out it's not fixed at all would make me trust the applevis team a lot less.

It's working for some people and not for others so yeah, I'd recommend changing it.

That's not necessarily the same as "has fixed". So, in that sense, the title isn't misleading. We've all encountered this bug, at varying frequencies, in wildly different websites, etc. So while the aim of the new release might be to fix the persistent, ever-present but maddeningly elusive SNR bug, it doesn't mean that they've succeeded where a whole community of persons who use the software in question have failed.

I'll leave it for you guys to talk about as i'm not a mac user.

Thanks for letting us know.

now it's not just safari hangs, it's spreading everywhere. something as basic as textedit, system settings, voiceover utility, hell, even menubar. if you think it's getting better, i suspect it is because you want to...human nature, you know.

Those who can still reproduce "Safari not responding" should submit bug reports, with sysdiagnose logs. Otherwise, there's little chance that Apple's software developers will track down and fix the remaining issues.

As I said, sadly as of right now VMWare Fusion is broken by Sonoma. It that's important to you, I'd stay away for now.

Otherwise, I would say that it's a worthwhile upgrade; the Safari Not Responding issue (notice the capitals, it's an official title for an official problem) does seem to be less of a problem, but definitely not a solved problem; in fact, when it happens now, it's, if anything, even more severe. So less often, more serious. I do appreciate the responsiveness though, the refinements in Eloquence, the UI changes for iCloud, new Siri voices, all that good stuff. I could have less of the bugs--Dictionary is now less accessible than it was, sometimes bordering on useless, even as system-wide spell-check is now working right in Safari and Mail again, and the Finder interface to iOS devices no longer supports keyboard access to copy files. Let's face it, you can never win this game, but you can always make progress. If you're comfortable upgrading, and I'd say that this upgrade is safe to perform from System Settings where it is very reasonably-sized, then I'd go for it. But there's no real urgency either; if it's not a big deal to you, and you have particular reasons to stay behind, then just do that.

Just as I was submitting another bug report to Apple related to PDF reading in Books I tried to use "open with" in context menu and couldn't actually do it – it just closes when I'm trying to move into this submenu. Sanoma 14.2/14.21

As I had a little free time, I thought I would see if I could reproduce the problem whereby filtering a table in Javascript causes the table to become unusable. I don't know for sure if this is what I was seeing but it was quite easy to do. I simply had a small table, put an id on one of the rows and had a button that hid that row by putting "display: none" on it.

Anyway, I have sent this html file and an exhaustive steps to reproduce so hopefully it can be dropped down the big well of despair or whatever it is they call their internal bug tracker.

I did the same thing with the navigate by headings bug back in 14.0 and they've not addressed it, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Apple had introduced the option to promote a less frustrating experience with Single Key Quick Nav and text fields. Unfortunately, though, said experience is soured pretty significantly by a complete lack of feature stability. More specifically, I seem to intermittently encounter the following issues:

* Sometimes VoiceOver seemingly becomes confused in regards to when Single Key should and shouldn’t be on. Even when not in text fields, it’ll occasionally pass single letters to the website in question. A good place to try this is on Reddit, where it randomly started hiding posts in my feed when I’d press H even though I’d turned Single Letter on. Most times toggling it off and back on rectifies the issue ( at least temporarily), but some websites will just keep on confusing it into continuously reproducing buggy behaviour.
* Multi-line text fields, such as the one that I’m using to type up this reply tend to also throw VO off, and it’ll more often than not completely disrespect the single letter text fields preference. This also happens in places like Spotlight Search and Safari’s location bar, seemingly because both instances don’t directly drop you into the edit field for some reason (I think this might be another separate bug in and of itself).
* I’m not a fan of the fact that using F and Shift+F to navigate text fields will automatically switch into the “ignore Single Letter” mode. In my opinion, the ideal behaviour would see this be an option toggle where text field jump controls doesn’t automatically assume that you’d like to start typing like tab does, and instead lets you continue navigating using Single Letter. Only if you tab into or interact with a text field should it begin ignoring Single Letter automatically.
* Sometimes, Single Key will completely refuse to respond and has to be toggled off and back on. This is most seen when doing something like reading, say, an AppleVis post/reply line by line using up and down arrow, then hitting something like H or Shift+H with Single Key on. Sometimes this’ll even happening when using L to move between links, where it’ll randomly lock up and you have to re-focus on another page element to continue. I’m fairly certain this has something to do with the bug where sometimes navigating to an element (such as link) will randomly lock you on that element and the only way to move away from it is to stop interacting (despite the fact that I never interacted with it in the first place)!
* Along with the fact that the SNR bug is still present, Safari seems to now exhibit a new odd behaviour on some webpages where it’ll cut off the last few letters of a line when scrolling using the arrow keys. Even when using left and right arrow to locate the missing letters, they’re nowhere to be found. It’s as if the pages in question are written incorrectly, which is simply not true because they render properly on my Windows machines. In these cases, using option+left or right arrow to attempt moving between words fails pretty spectacularly and begins announcing disjointed, fragmented letters and generally behaves like VoiceOver is suffering a stroke.

In Conclusion: Absolutely nothing was fixed in the 14.2 MacOS update that pertains to Safari stability, so I’m going to agree (albeit significantly less harshly) that the thread title should probably be changed. I’ve never gone out of my way to report bugs to Apple so am unsure of how I should proceed with what I would call pretty staggering issues, or if I should even bother. I’ve gotten the vibe thus far that people have spent years reporting these sorts of issues and they have yet to be resolved.

I have my M1 MacBook Pro on Monterey and it is super reliable. No issues whatsoever. Safari on 17 dot two does not respond a little more, but nothing that will stop me, or nothing like some people on here have experienced. I’ve not had the issues where safari will just come to a complete halt requiring a force quit.
I may create a secondary APFS volume and install Sonoma on it to see if it’s any better.
But as of now, Monterey will be my main choice of operating system. It is much more reliable than even Ventura. And it will be supported at least until macOS 15’s release.
I think the SNR bug has been going on ever since MacOS lion. Could be my slower 2011 iMac 21.5 inch 2.5 GHz intel core I5 second generation, but as the webpage loads it will say Safari busy for about five seconds.
It’s got 16 GB of ram.
I will say it doesn’t do it in chrome.
Like I said before, could be the 13-year-old iMac, or that bug could be still happening.
Will never know.

I tried Sonoma once and backed out to Ventura. This has left me in the awkward position of my Ventura Mac believing that my music library is only compatible with Sonoma, even though my music library hasn't changed, and even though I restored it from a Time Machine backup. Plus, my iPhone is on iOS 17, which means it won't sync with my Ventura Mac. While it's possible to upgrade a Mac and then downgrade, issues like these render it impractical, and as a result, I'll be moving to Sonoma eventually.

I had hoped to migrate to 14.2.1 a couple of weeks ago, but the best laid plans etc etc. Still on Ventura for at least the next few weeks because I simply can't handle the downtime of an upgrade.

Is Monterey running good these days? I remember having some quirky issues with it and found Ventura, 13.6.x specifically, running amazingly well on my old as dirt MBP.

I still have it on my intell Macbook Pro. On my Mac Pro desktop, Ventura introduced bugs. Staying away from Sonoma on my Mac Studio.

Voiceover does not read an entire article. It stops at pages or gets bogged down and can’t keep reading. Sometimes it completely stops when trying to read an article. If the article is multiple pages, it will not move from page to page seamlessly.

Hi Barbara Silver. In what program are you experiencing this? MS Word? Pages? I have seen this issue in Pages forever.

I'm reasonably sure this isn't going to be a new thing, but the last week or so in particular I have noticed that using application menus with VO+M has become a little erratic.

This is when navigating to menus by letter, instead of going to the menu starting with that letter it will end up piddling about in the Apple menu.

I've had this in a few apps - most notably Safari but also Finder, maybe PyCharm.

For example, in Finder I press VO+M and it says Apple. I then press G for the Go menu and it says Apple again. I press G again and it says Lock Screen Q. Usually I can fix it by quickly using Cmd+Tab twice to move out and back to the app.

Is anyone else noticing this? I suspect it's been around for a while and it's just only now that I am becoming more aware that it's yet another stupid bug rather than my fault. Just yet another one of those irritations that mean you have to concentrate on the mechanics of using VoiceOver rather than on the task you are trying to complete.

Still, 14.3 is out next week. I'm sure this will fix all the outstanding bugs.

Right...?

I have noticed that if I use VO+M then try to use the up arrow to open the menu, with the intention of going straight to the last menu item, that it instead just speaks the name of the top menu (e.g. View) instead. I am certain this worked until recently. In PyCharm I would use VO+M, W to go to Window then up to go to the projects I have open. Now I'm lucky if it jumps to the Window menu then it won't open it without me having to go down before I go up.

And I wish I could type in a comment on Applevis without feeling my blood pressure going up. I mean not because of my general rage but just how bloody difficult it is to edit the text once you have typed it. It is absolutely intent of reading from the start of my comment and trying to get to the top just makes me want to fling my Mac out of the window. Applevis is one of the simplest sites in the world (I mean that as a big compliment) and if Safari and VoiceOver can't even cope with this then there really is no hope.

I have noticed the bug where the names of menus in the menu bar are occasionally announced as "Apple," and I'm on Ventura. I have always assumed that this is related to another long-standing bug. The bug is this: Press VO+M to go to the menu bar. Then immediately press Command+Tab to switch apps. It might read the name of the first app correctly, but each subsequent Command+Tab keypress announces app icon names as "Apple." I guess it must be a real stumper of a bug because the first evidence of this bug report was painted on the caves at Lascaux.

I can confirm that on Ventura, when focus is in the menubar and on the name of a menu, up arrow simply names the menu. It does not open the menu and move focus to the bottom entry. You must press down arrow to open the menu, then up arrow to access the bottom entry.

Ironically, if you press VO + m to access the Menubar, then press down one time, then press Command + Tab, or Shift + Command + Tab, the, "Apple, Apple, Apple, apple. . . " issue will not occur.

Food for thought. 🤨

Maybe I just imagined it ever worked that way. I wouldn't put it past me...