safari stopping

Since I upgraded to mountain lion my safari quits when just active on the sidebar ie not when I'm using it - it's not crashing, just going inactive. This never happened before. I checked for the virus whose name I forget now but apparently can cause random stuff like this, but my machine seems to be clear. Also web pages that remember my details no longer do so. Also my mail program seems to not pick up new messages just showing the exclamation mark when I do 'get mail'. (nothing wrong with my internet link). I have to quit mail & restart. Nothing major but annoying & makes me wish I hadn't upgraded. I have macbook pro, 3 yrs old, upgraded to 8 gig ram. Thanks for any advice anyone.

Download Onyx and run the full suite of maintenance and cache cleaning tools. In particular, make sure you clear the various caches for "internet". Perhaps Safari has a buggy cache. Also make sure you aren't running Safari in Private Browsing mode, found in the menu under Safari. You may also need to repair the Keychain. Run Keychain Access, then select Keychain First Aid.

As for your Mail... I'm not quite sure if these steps will fix them. Try those first and we'll go from there.

onyx

thanks for that, so far so good.

no change

but unfortunately no difference to safari just going inactive. It's not a problem as it doesn't quit while in use, but makes me suspicious

lizard07 said:

but unfortunately no difference to safari just going inactive. It's not a problem as it doesn't quit while in use, but makes me suspicious

Click to expand...

I'm a bit confused here since earlier you mentioned Safari sitting in the sidebar. Do you mean the Dock?

Ah, you know what? I think this is a new feature that actually came in Lion. OS X will automatically quit compliant apps that have been idle for an extended period of time if the RAM that they are taking up is needed for another task. This is actually something that was inspired by the automatic resource management features in iOS. The idea here is that when you re-open the app, it should resume where it left off, much like apps that are compliant with that feature in iOS do now. Now, in the System Preferences under General, if you checked the option to Close windows when quitting an application, then the auto-resume might not work in these instances. If you are running a lot of memory-hungry apps at once, or have a minimal amount of RAM installed, then you will be more likely to experience this.

Did your other issues resolve with the prior tips? If so, then that would seem to confirm this.

EDIT: The feature is called Automatic Termination. Here's more about it, and a way to disable it if it really bothers you:
Disable Automatic Termination of Apps in Mac OS X Lion & Mountain Lion

ah...

thanks, guess that's the answer & never saw it before in Lion. Maybe I'm just over-paranoid about that virus , think it's called flashback or some such thing isn't it?
thanks again.

You don't have the Flashback trojan, or any other kind of malware. OS X already has built-in protection against known malware like that.

lifeisabeach said:

EDIT: The feature is called Automatic Termination. Here's more about it, and a way to disable it if it really bothers you:
Disable Automatic Termination of Apps in Mac OS X Lion & Mountain Lion

Click to expand...

Good catch. That never occurred to me. I have not paid much attention to that feature. Normally if I am away long enough for that to take hold there is not enough else going on to need the memory.