Web pages crash all the time in Safari on iPhone

The only app I experience issues with is Safari - and it's almost every webpage I use now. I've done all the steps, but they don't work. I can see I’m clearly not the only person having this issue.

This really tells me it's a software issue on Apple's part then because I see it on nearly every single web page I go to. It's been going on for about 9 months and is beyond frustrating. I’m to the point of downloading a new browser on my iPhone and not using Safari anymore.

My safari was crashing and up-scrolling while I was mid-read in a news articles and resetting webpages repeatedly until I got the message about “safari has encountered repeated errors”…..the way I finally stopped it was to turn off “Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement” in Safari advanced settings. All the glitching nonsense was gone instantly and completely. I don’t know enough about software and coding to be able to say what is wrong, but my best logical guess is that the error is on Apple’s end not the phone or the websites fault.

And off topic: I was a Samsung user for a decade and I switch to iPhone for my kids and I have regretted every single moment. I feel like the iPhone is stepping back to the days of dial up internet service where every program glitched, and each machine was incompatible with all other machines and any task took forever. While Samsungs are fast, efficient and compatible with any and all other devices except iPhones.

THAT IS SIMPLY MY OPINION.

This is interesting. How could one possibly know that “tens of millions of people use Safari on their iPhones daily without any crashing issues whatsoever?” I would argue that a small number of people stumbling into this discussion forum and taking the time to type out this complaint in detail likely conveys a widespread issue. The lack of vocal or written complaint from the majority of users would not be evidence of proper functioning in any scenario, but complaints of crashing from a few hundred users would certainly be evidence of a potential trend at the least. Imagine if NHTSA applied your logic to recalls for safety concerns on vehicles. “So what that 45 people driving this type of car have been in accidents where their airbags didn’t deploy? We haven’t heard anything about an issue from the other 15,000 vehicle owners. It’s clearly operator error…”

Same problem, has been happening so much that I can’t really browse any site.

Funny enough, it happened on this site, too. Someone asked for a screenshot

This is definitely on Apple to fix. I noticed the issue possibly as far back as iOS 15. I notice that it happens on pages that load a lot of ads or have long-running JavaScript in the background. Web pages that heavily track users are more prone to crashing as well.

I'm fairly certain this is related to browser protections fighting against webpages. It could be stopping tracking scripts that are reloading and causing an error when they are stopped abruptly.

We'll have to wait on an update from Apple.

I encountered persistent issues and contacted Apple Support multiple times. We went through extensive troubleshooting:

1. Verified latest iOS
2. Restarted device
3. Enabled JavaScript
4. Turned off Private Relay
5. Disabled Spoken Content
6. Turned off iCloud Safari syncing
7. Disabled VPN settings
8. Uninstalled VPN app
9. Performed a clean iOS install

Despite these steps, the problem persisted. Finally, we disabled Safari extensions, which resolved the issue.

Not just a problem with Safari. As others have noted, all WebKit browsers have this problem.

On Safari, I read articles from The Guardian. Any sufficiently long article (e.g. restaurant review with comments) is guaranteed to crash multiple times, and then to reload at the top of the article, forcing me to re-open the comments each time, and scroll down to where I was marooned.

I have been reading The Atlantic on the Google browser (no tabs, single document only) until recently, had to bail when a single (rather long) article crashed every 15s or so. (At least that reloaded near where I left off.)

Switching from Google to Firefox a couple days ago did not help, not as crashy as the original long article, but crashes continue.

Gotta Point the finger of blame squarely at WebKit.

I'm a software developer, made a web-playable game that works pretty much everywhere except in my iphone 13, which throws that error.

This iphone 13 has ios 17.5.1. My wife's iphone 12 with the same ios version fails with the same error.

But... I have an iphone 10 with 16.7.8 and my game works fine.

So, it is something Apple added in an update, possibly starting with ios 17.

Perhaps some lock so heavy web stuff doesn't ruin hardware performance?

First, that's not the norm - tens of millions of people use Safari on their iPhones daily without any crashing issues whatsoever.

Second, the APIs used by Safari, known as WebKit, are the basis of all web browsers on iOS.

Other web browsers are just different graphical shells and handle bookmarks and cookies differently but still use the underlying WebKit APIs.

WebKit | Apple Developer Documentation

If you still see regular crashes using Safari, I highly recommend you make an appointment to have your phone examined, it's most likely a hardware memory issue with your device:

Genius Bar Reservation and Apple Support Options - Apple

I can't speak for everything that triggers the issue, but the problem is definitely triggered by low intensity webgl applications (I know this because I am developing one). Just speculating but performance problems may be exacerbated by apple's privacy measures, which could be attempting to defeat hardware fingerprinting. The level of application performance I'm seeing on recent iphones is truly pathetic for low poly applications within minimal shader routines, far below what you would expect with hardware of this spec.

Being that so many web applications are crashing on iphone, it would be great if Apple surfaced out of memory exceptions (or whatever it is that happens when you hit the limit with the GPU) so that developers can display a helpful message to the user instead of the current useless text surfaced in Safari. The current state of affairs seems counter to the interests of internet users and developers.

Well i have both of those and im seeing it on both of them. Idk maybe its an issue with apple