Scrolling stutters and freezes in Safari with macOS Tahoe 26.1

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Level 1

12 points

Scrolling stutters and freezes in Safari with macOS Tahoe 26.1

Safari scrolling stutters and freezes with macOS Tahoe 26.1

Since upgrading my MacBook Pro to Tahoe, Safari temporarily freezes and stutters when scrolling webpages using the trackpad.

It doesn't happen when I scroll in Safari using a mouse scroll wheel.
It doesn't happen if I scroll by clicking and dragging the scroll bar.

I noticed it first on one of Apple's documentation webpages (How to download and install macOS - Apple Support). I can trigger the issue if I scroll quickly up and down using the trackpad. It regularly freezes for about a 1 second at a time.

My laptop is a 16-inch MacBook Pro (16-inch, Nov 2023) with an Apple M3 Max chip and 36 GB RAM.

Some things I checked:

Cleared the cache
No Safari extensions installed
Tried creating a new user account but same thing
The issue doesn't affect other apps.

MacBook Pro 16″

Posted on Dec 7, 2025 11:32 AM

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Answer 1

freyr Author

Level 1

12 points

Dec 9, 2025 11:40 PM in response to freyr

I tried reinstalling MacOS while keeping my documents, but no luck: the scrolling still freezes if I visit a page like How to download and install macOS - Apple Support and scroll up and down rapidly using the trackpad.

Then I went for the nuclear option and erased my entire disk and reinstalled macOS Sequoia. The issue was gone! Then I did a fresh install of Tahoe 26.1 and the issue is back. Really disappointed.

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