iPhone Safari Browser Crash

I’m noticing my browser crashing every now and then. At first I thought it was just something I was doing, but now I’m certain it’s the browser. The last crash occurred while watching a trailer on the Apple trailer site for iPhone. Is anyone else experiencing this issue?

Update: This has gotten a lot less buggy with the 2.2 upgrade, but I still do experience the occasional issue.  I have started re-starting my iPhone once per day.  

83 COMMENTS

  1. Safari has crashed on me several times already. Hopefully, Apple will release a patch to address this soon.

  2. Yes! My browser crashed every five to ten minutes today. Which is not cool. I’m not sure what to do…go to the apple store? I won’t return the iphone, but I do want to know if it’s just a handful of phones doing this, because if it is I want a different one!

  3. Same here, i was on the phone with apple care for an hour today got the old run around and was told to resent, restore, airplane mode, etc… nothing works so wait for the patch it is…anyone get the same problem when using google maps?

  4. It reset several times on me today. I was on cnn.com and digg.com. This is my first Apple product, and I am anxious to see how well they are at product support.

  5. while doing what ever you are doing on safari try our best th leave your finger on the screen. i think the iphonethinks that it is not eing usedso it shuts off to save power.

    just a thought

  6. I’m getting crashes as well on Safari and Google Maps. Haven’t really been able to use either function on my iPhone for more than a few minutes at a time because of the crashes.

  7. Chris, I would agree, especially because it went out while watching a trailer. But I just had it crash while clicking on an RSS.

  8. Ha! Chris is obviously typing on his iPhone. 🙂

    My Safari crashes fairly often, as well; although I don’t mind so much as it’s just a phone. I can’t seem to listen to music and surf the web without the iPod app crashing, as well. Google Maps has crashes several times.

    I assume this will all be fixed via an update, soon.

  9. If Safari or other apps are crashing go to

    Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings

    Try this first. If it doesn’t help, it did for me. Then you will want to reset from iTunes WHICH WILL ERASE ALL DATA (music/movies/contacts) but don’t whine, just re-sync.

    If that doesn’t work, go to Apple and swap it for another one. (Call the store first to see if they have swappers in stock.)

    • I dont have crashing problem, my crash was permanent, so to say. The browser just froze when i was connecting to google :S but then i did the "Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings" rotation and it just melted my safari!:D thank you Thistle Down! 🙂

  10. I was also having safari crashing problems that seemed to be getting worse. It got to the point that I couldn’t even read one web page without a crash. A simple restart seems to have fixed the problem. Haven’t had one crash since. I suspect a bug like a memory leak that gets worse the longer you go without restarting the system. YMMV

    Cheers,

    Ben

  11. Me too…Apple are you listening??

    Crashes every 3-5th time I use Safari. In Maps, at CNN, at apple.com, etc.

  12. I was experiencing a lot of Google Maps and Safari crashes as well. So far, a power off/on cycle seems to have fixed it.

  13. Interesting reading your experiences. I’ve had a fair number of crashes, resulting, I think, from using Safari like I do my desktop Safari: I leave many windows open. I think iPhone webkit has two obvious problems: a vicious memory leak and serious instanility in the plugin architecture. I suggest this not only explains the crashing when Safari/Google maps (which presumably uses webkit)are left open, but also Apple’s decision to exclude Flash, Java, and only minimal video support. Weird that they shipped anyway – i hope this doesn’t indicate a systemic problem in hardware. Tonight the iPhone gave me a scare and hung up hard. Wouldn’t restart for @ 3 mins.

    On the plus side, I typed this whole thing on the keyboard pretty quickly, so I’m getting better.

  14. I’ve had quite a few hangups so far and it was really annoying me. I reset the phone (without a restore) and it seems to me working fine now. Hopefully when they release a patch to fix this memory leak or whatever, they will also enable landscape keyboard use for email and notes apps. Typing this post is great in lanscape mode!

  15. I’ve had several anonymous restarts on the iPhone. I think it’s also a memory leak issue myself, after larger pages it tends to happen. The only bright spot seems to be that it keeps your last web address so when you get that restart it reloads the page. It doesn’t boad well for me that it crashes so easily. I guess that’s what we get for being a early adoptors.

  16. Thanks, Ben. A power on/off cycle seems to have fixed this for me. Safari isn’t crashing & I can listen to music & surf at the same time too without iPod crashes.

  17. Safari, Google Maps, YouTube all crash!. Even Ipod feature and Phone crashes! After all that I still love this piece of S**T! All software related issues which will be addressed with an itunes update. Question s when?

  18. I concur with the restart recommendation. Crashes of increasing frequency stopped immediately after restart. Something is leaking memory for sure. Cupertino will figure it out and patch it soon. Meanwhile the workaround is painless.

  19. Thanks for the cold reboot idea. I shutdown my iPhone completely and it seems that all of the functionality is a lot more stable (safari, iPod, google maps). Hopefully this will be fixed in the near future instead of forcing a reboot every day.

  20. I too am having a problem with safari crashing unexpectedly. Alos, when I’m listening to the iPod and try to use Safari at the same time the iPod crashes on occasion. Not everytime, but every so often.

  21. yea been having the same problem lately, hopefully apple will release a patch soon because besides safari crashing everyone in a while the iphone is just great

  22. Safari has crashed on every iPhone I have used, including 2 at the apple store itself, viewing their pages on their WiFi. Also two friends consistently crash every 30 seconds or so. This is clearly a widespread problem. Any remedies?

  23. uhh!! im so glad to know im not the only one having this problem :D:D when i’m on Safari and doing another thing at the same time (example: listening to music while on safari) my iphone crashes.. hope Apple can fix this as soon as possible!!!

  24. Today, I started having constant Safari crashes while surfing. I could only use the browser for 10 – 15 seconds before Safari would just close. Tried powering down the phone and powering back up — that seemed to fix the problem. Incidentally, this is the first time I have powered down in the 6 days that I had the phone — I was just using the sleep mode.

  25. I had no problems with Safari crashing when I purchased my iPhone. But while on vacation, Safari suddenly started crashing on a regular basis. Sometimes it couldn’t finish opening the home page, other times it would crash while simply scrolling. I thought perhaps it was due to large file sizes, but text only rss pages crashed as well. I just tried the suggested reset command. Much more stable (thank you!), but I can still crash Safari by going one or two links deep.

    I wonder if utilizing Airplane Mode triggered something…

  26. I reset mine and everything seemed ok. But I went to yellowbook.com and tried to enter some data in a data field and the browser crashed.

    I experieince this a lot when doing data entry on entry fields.

  27. My safari browser and google maps always crash, even if there;s just one window open. And maybe it’s just youtube, but when it gets dark outside, i cant watch any youtube videos.

  28. Just turn off the phone and turn it back on (hold down the top button) i do it once a day now and safari and google maps never crashes.

  29. Safari began crashing once or twice a day two weeks ago.
    My browsing habits or the websites I visit have not changed since I purchased the Iphone.

    The browser is now crashing every single time I access my e-mail and almost every site I go on.

    I have to relaunch safari several times before I get the entire page.

    I’ve noticed that I happens on graphically heavy sites.

    I agree that it may be a memory issue.

    Apple needs to patch this problems – it is extremely annoying – I squeeze my phone a little tighter every time the browser crashes.

    The phone is still awesome but WE NEED A FIX!!

  30. Brutal, to be so excited about a gadget and have it crash this often. The reset feature works untill you visit a few web pages and than puff – all over we begin. How about the setup wonders. I spent the entire setup day at AT&T, fantastic people but not one of them trained to set up this phone. Lots of work to be done I hope they release some updates soon.

  31. i have a problem with the iphone freezing on websites, id be scrolling down a site and it would not respond this happens especially on pages rhat have a large number of pictures, an example is a page on a car forum. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

  32. Mine was crashing every time i was trying to log onto my myspace. I cleared the cache, history and cookies…I also rebooted the phone by holding down the wake/sleep button and sliding the red slider. Waited a couple of seconds then pushed the wake button again while holding it down till the apple logo appears. It seemed to have solved the problem. TRY IT!

  33. I hadn’t powered my iPhone down in over two weeks, and got to the point where Safari was almost completely unusable due to the constant “crashing”. Following the suggestion of Ben, and others on this thread, I power-cycled and it seems to be fine (for now). I guess this is to be expected for a 1.0 product. I half expect to start seeing BSDs here any day now ;-).

  34. I was having bad safari crashes also. I was beginning to get worried and started planning to go to the apple store and reproduce one of these “crashes”

    But before I got to hasty I googled the problem (on my iPhone) and found this blog with bens suggestion. I bought my iPhone 3 days ago and hadn’t powered it down once, I only was using the sleep option. So I used bens reboot idea and… It worked! No crashes and I typed this on my iphone while listening to this superior most kickass iPod yet!

    -confessed iphone lover,

    Jamaph

  35. My Iphone too kept crashing from safari, also google maps and youtube crashed a couple of times. I think its a memory heap issue as we do not terminate an application appropriately. We just hit the home button to exit an app and when we have opened too many things and we do not close these apps, there will be dangling sessions which is causing memory leakage and hence whenever you open an app which needs some memory, the app crashes. So resetting the session by resetting the phone is a temporary workaround for the issue until we get a fix for this issue in a couple of weeks hopefully. Your ipod is the least likely to crash as you ensure that the ipod is not playing a song when you press the home button. It has the appropriate exit functions. So a software patch which will clean up all sessions when you exit an app should do the trick. Hope they do it soon. So till then keep resetting the phone once a day to clear dangling sessions

    Raghu

  36. it’s the poor java environment on iPhone I guess. ihphone safari crashes ecwrytimw I use jivetalk, hope apple will fix this . we aren’t paying 399 for a toy. we need something that look good and work like other pda phone. if apple can’t solve these problems language pack keyboard set/ crashes/ widget compatibility(it claims iPhone uses “osx”) /heat problem/ poor speaker/video recording function/ office function/ perhaps an iPhone bootcamp!!!! so we can REALLY start using iPhone as a smart phone with windows? oh come on steve jobs..you can do it better

  37. yeah, had the same problem. Its a good thing that when you reopen safari.. All of the windows and sites are atill there. A simple reload would continue with what i waz doing before it crashes.

    Honestly, id thoguht that i would find a fix over the net. But after reading through this site.. Ill just wait for the update.

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