Mac OSX/Safari Crash Question!

[FlashHarry]

Ok, so both Safari and Sherlock have been hanging/crashing lately. With Safari, it crashes when I try to visit certain sites, Slate.com being one.

I looked at the crash log and found this:
Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000200


I Googled KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE and found that it's not uncommon. Now, as I'm at work and don't have administrator privileges, is there anything I can do about this annoying little bug?

Other than that, Safari's been a dream!

[Mika]

1. Do you have OS X version of Diskwarrior from Alsoft?

You really need to run it (as in: boot from the CD rom), every now and then, to defrag and optimize your drive(s) AND directory files (I do it once a month).

All of my hangs and hiccups went away afterwards.

[MGKrebs]

2. I'll have to check that out, too.

I've been having the same problems, but I assumed it had something to do with the Comcast cable modem not getting along with safari or perhaps MacMail.

[FlashHarry]

4. Sounds good, but...

...since I'm not the administrator on this machine (grrr), I can't install anything. And it takes forever for our IT guys to do anything.

[htuttle]

3. You can try to clear the cache, perhaps

The 'EXEC_BAD_ACCESS' exception isn't much more descriptive than it logging that 'I Crashed'. It means that something attempted to access memory that was invalid (ie., a 'bad pointer', for any other programmer types out there). There's about a billion reasons that could have happened.

If it didn't used to crash on these pages, it stands to reason that unless they added something bad to them (on slate.com's end) that Safari can't deal with, the only other condition that could have changed is the state of the cache files. Maybe it stored a bad cache file for one of the images on this page, etc... and it's crashing when it tries to make sense out of it.

Sometimes the part of the crash log that follows the 'Thread # crashed', called the 'stack trace' can be more helpful in figuring out where it crashed, but since we don't have the code to (most of) Safari, it might not help anyway.

Under the 'Safari' menu, there's an Empty Cache menu item. If that doesn't work, there are some freeware programs out there (look at versiontracker.com) that can do a more thorough job of clearing it (such as deleting the cache index file, the cache folder, etc....

[htuttle]

5. I just tried slate.com on Safari 1.0 (v85) and OSX 10.2.3

Seem to be fine. I browsed a few articles, and no crashes.

I'd empty your cache as I describe above, since it doesn't seem to be a general site incompatibility with Safari (either that, or I'm just lucky today...)

[FlashHarry]

8. Hmm. Mine worked fine yesterday, too.

But not the day before. It does always seem to be the same sites, mainly Slate.com and Yahoo.com. I wonder if it's a Java problem--or maybe something with the popup blocker.

BTW, I'm running OSX 10.2.6/Safari 1.0v85. I'm on an older G4 (350MHz/448MB RAM)

[DS1]

6. sorry, but

Get a PC!

/reverse of obligatory mac-user response

[FlashHarry]

7. Well, actually...

...**speaking in hushed tones** I have an HP laptop at home running WinXP, and I have yet to have a crash of any kind.

I will say, however, that I really like OSX so far. I just hope they work the bugs out.