Apple’s Safari is one of the speediest and most stable browsers around. But occasionally it does run into problems. One of these is that it can shut down, displaying a message that says ‘Safari quit unexpectedly’ or something similar. Fortunately, there are several things you can do to make sure the problem doesn’t re-occur.
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Tip: Before we get started, some of the tips below involve several steps and can be a bit laborious. There is an easy way to deal with that, though. CleanMyMac X contains tools that allow you to quickly free up RAM, among other things. And the lack of RAM memory is what sometimes crashes browsers. So, check this app out (or download the free version of this software).
What to do if Safari quits unexpectedly on your Mac
If you have this message How To Fix Quit Unexpectedly Apps In Mac, this video is for you. If an app doesn’t quit as expected, you can force quit the app (you may lose unsaved changes). Choose Apple menu Force Quit, select the app in the dialog that appears, then click Force Quit. See also Change General preferences on Mac Open apps and documents on Mac If an app freezes or quits unexpectedly on Mac.
If you find yourself frustratedly googling ‘why does Safari keep closing on my Mac?’, here’s what to do.
Check your extensions
Out of date or corrupt extensions are one possible cause of problems with Safari.
Launch Safari.
Click on the Safari menu and choose Preferences.
Select the Extensions tab.
Review the list of installed extensions.
If you see any that look suspicious or that you no longer use, click on them and press Uninstall.
Remove website data
Data like cookies and temporary files can sometimes cause problems for Safari. The solution is to remove them. Unfortunately Safari’s tools for doing that don’t allow for a great deal of choice in what to remove.
Go to Preferences in Safari again.
Click on Privacy.
Press the button labelled ‘Manage Website Data’
To remove data for individual websites, browse through the list until you find the site, or search for it using the search box. When you find it, select it.
Click Remove.
To remove data for all websites, press Remove All.
Press Done when you’re finished.
The above steps remove all the data, like cookies for shopping carts, that websites use to track what you do while you’re on the site. It may mean that you have to log in to sites again, even if you previously selected ‘Keep me logged in’. The steps above don’t remove your browser history.
Change your startup preferences
If you find that Safari quits unexpectedly as soon as you start up, it could be that a tab or window that you had open the first time it quit reopens when you relaunch and causes it to crash again. Here’s how to prevent that.
In Safari Preferences, choose the General tab.
If the top menu, ‘Safari opens with’ is set to ‘all windows from last session, or ‘All private windows from last session,’ click on it.
Choose ‘A new window’ or ‘A new private window’
Close Preferences and restart Safari.
Stop plug-ins
Plug-ins allow users to see and hear different types of content on websites, like Flash animation. If none of the steps above have solved your problem, try turning them off.
Open Safari Preferences and click Advanced.
Check the box next to ‘Stop plug-ins to save power’
Close preferences.
Use the Develop menu to empty cache
As we said earlier, using Manage Website Data to get rid of cache files isn’t ideal. However, there is another way, using Safari’s Develop menu.
Launch Safari’s Preferences again and click on the Advanced tab.
At the bottom of the window, check the box next to ‘Show Develop menu in menu bar’
Close Preferences.
Click on the Develop menu.
Choose Empty caches.
Manually remove Safari data files
If none of the above fix the problem, you’ll have to go deeper and search for data files in the Finder and remove them. Here’s how to do that.
Click on the Finder in the Dock and navigate to the Go menu.
Choose Go to Folder
In the box, paste in: ~/Library/
You will find yourself in your user Library, where preferences and cache files are found.
Choose the Caches folder and look for the following files
com.apple.Safari
com.apple.Safari.SearchHelper
com.apple.SafariServices
Messages App Not Responding Mac
com.apple.WebKit.PluginProcess
com.apple.WebProcess
Metadata/Safari
- Drag any of the files you find to the Trash.
- Now, look for a folder called Preferences and drag the following two files to the Trash, if they are there:
com.apple.WebKit.PluginHost.plist
com.apple.WebKit.PluginProcess.plist
com.apple.Safari.plist
- Finally, look for a folder called Saved Application State and drag this file to the Trash
com.apple.Safari.savedState
- Empty the Trash.
How to fix ‘Safari quit unexpectedly’ the easy way
If all the steps above seem like a lot of time-consuming work, you’ll be pleased to know there is an easier way to clear website data, disable extensions and get rid of cache data. CleanMyMac X does all of this and more. Here’s how to use it.
We’ll be using a free version of CleanMyMac X. You can download it here.
- After you’ve installed the app, click on the Uninstaller tab in the sidebar.
- Find Safari in the list.
- Now, select Safari components for deletion.
For example, you can select:
Preferences
Supporting Files
Binaries
- Clicking Your Selection reveals a dropdown menu.
- Choose Reset.
- Finally, click the big Reset button underneath.
This operation t’s kind of similar to the previous part where we manually removed caches from Safari. But this time we’ve done it with CleanMyMac X with much less dirty work.
More Safari magic with CleanMyMac X
As we’ve said above, Safari often quits when your Mac doesn’t have enough temporary memory, or RAM. There’s a button to instantly free up RAM in CleanMyMac X.
Go to the Maintenance tab > Free up RAM
“SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly” is an error message that could sometime appear on Mac computers while the user is browsing the Internet on their Safari browser. Some users even report that this issue may occur even if/when they aren’t using Safari at all.
Messages App Quits Unexpectedly Macro
User Complaints “SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly”
In most cases, once the error starts appearing, it keeps popping-up and nagging the user no matter how many times the latter clicks on the Ignore button. Most people report that the error message re-appears every 10 or so seconds once the previous one has been ignored. Some users seem to still be able to use their browser while the error notification is displayed on the screen.
There could be different causes of this problem, but in almost all cases the reason behind the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly error has something to do with compatibility issues. If you are concerned that the cause of this error is malware in your system, there’s no need to panic as this is most likely not the case.
Messages App Freezing Mac
Researchers suggest that what likely triggers the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly message is a compatibility conflict between a certain browser component/add-on and the SIP (System Integrity Protection) feature. SIP is a macOS protection feature introduced with the El Capitan macOS release – it was around the time of the release of El Capitan that users first stated experiencing the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly.
What SIP does is it blocks the access to certain system files and settings so that potentially malicious apps cannot access and modify them. However, sometimes non-harmful apps/browser extensions may need to access such files and settings in order to function properly. Since SIP doesn’t allow this to happen, the outcome is the display of the SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly error message.
Below, we will show you a possible way to make this irritating issue disappear.
How to stop the “SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly” error from appearing
- First, you will have to temporarily disable SIP. To do this, in the Menu Bar, click on the Apple icon and select Restart.
- Now, hold down the Command + R buttons – this will reboot your Mac into Recovery Mod.
- Once the computer starts again, go to Utilities > Terminal.
- In Terminal, type the following command: csrutil disable.
- Hit Enter to execute the command and wait for it to complete.
- Restart your Mac and go to this folder: /System/Library/CoreServices/SafariSupport.bundle/Contents/MacOS/.
- Delete SafariBookmarksSyncAgent by moving it to Trash (this file is protected by SIP so unless you first disable this protection, you won’t be able to delete the file).
- Finally, don’t forget to re-enable SIP – this is a very important security feature for macOS and should not be left deactivated because, otherwise, your Mac may get exposed to danger. To re-enable SIP, repeat steps 1-4 but when you get to the Terminal, type csrutil enable (instead of csrutil disable) and execute the command by hitting the Enter button.
- Finally, restart your Mac one more time and you should be good to go. Hopefully, the “SafariBookmarksSyncAgent quit unexpectedly” would no longer appear while you are using your Safari browser.