Safari 5.1.2

[GeneL]

Chakravartin wrote:
[quote=GeneL]
Is there any way to check if I have "incompatible plugins/extras/admitted unknowns floating around" that are interfering and causing my problem or are my issues a product of bugs in Safari 5.1 used with Snow Leopard? And please, explain how to get rid of them, if that's the problem!

Start by turning off extensions with the on/off slider in Safari's Extension preferences.

If you quit and relaunch Safari and your troubles are gone then one or more of the extensions is at fault.

To find out which extension was at fault, turn on extensions with the on/off slider in the Extensions preference and then disable all extensions by unchecking the "enable..." checkbox for each one in the Extensions preferences.

Enable each extension one at a time (restarting Safari every time that you enable another extension) and watch for the symptoms to return.

Whichever extension is enabled just before the return of the symptoms, that one is probably the culprit. So, go back to the Extensions preference and click the "uninstall" button for that extension to get rid of it.
First, thank you, Chakravartin! Once again, you are there for me.

I will follow your suggestion, but the issue of the preferences including my customization of Safari's menu bar reverting back to the original basic settings doesn't occur each time I start up.

It only happens every so often, so I'm not sure how I can tell which extension, if any, is causing this weird reset of Safari.

I would think that, if it is due to a bad/corrupt extension, that it would happen consistently whenever I start up again.

Could there be another reason for this strange issue?

The fact that the problem may not show up for a time makes it difficult to identify the cause by the process of elimination.

If the problem occurred each time I reset my preferences the way I want, restarting and finding that the problem was gone would make it clear which extension was to blame. On the other hand, if there's no immediate change, then I can't see how I could judge a result. What then?

deckeda mentioned my unsuccessful attempt to revert back to Safari 5.0.5, which, as I understand it messed up something that had to do with "WebKit." Could some kind of residue from that still be having an effect on my newly installed Safari 5.1 update.

As you can imagine, I would love to be rid of this irritating glitch. So, if nothing seems to change after I disable the extensions, what else can I do to clear out the "unknowns floating around" on my computer?

As always, thank you for your suggestions.

[Chakravartin]

...the issue of the preferences including my customization of Safari's menu bar reverting...

What do you mean by "customization" ...? What do you do to the menus?

Ordinarily, a user can't modify an application's menus.

Did you mean to write "toolbar"instead of "menu bar" ...? If so then are you customizing it by right-clicking on the toolbar and dragging icons on/off of the toolbar?

[GeneL]

Chakravartin wrote:
...the issue of the preferences including my customization of Safari's menu bar reverting...

Did you mean to write "toolbar"instead of "menu bar" ...? If so then are you customizing it by right-clicking on the toolbar and dragging icons on/off of the toolbar?

Yep, I meant toolbar. I was posting from my Touchpad, so I couldn't check that it was called the toolbar.

I'll set up the "toolbar" the way I want it and every so often, when I open Safari, the toolbar has gone back to a basic configuration without my selections. Also, in the preferences, I have set my homepage as the forum, but it changes back to the Apple website, I had set Remove history items to Manually and it has gone back to After two weeks, Open "safe" files has gone from unchecked back to being checked, plus the "Open pages in tabs instead of windows" tabs preference I set to Never and even so, sometimes I'll find that a webpage has opened in "tabs." It's little glitches like these that have been bothering me.

I've been wondering what I can do about these issues and whether they were due to something that I had caused or if they were due to a problem with this new version of Safari. I have observed a lot of complaints about Lion and Safari 5.1, so I really didn't know if there is anything that I can do to fix things.

Chakravartin, you obviously are very knowledgeable, so it means a lot to me that you've so often taken the time to help me in working through problems like these.

[Chakravartin]

Seems like it's a corrupt preference file.

Quit Safari and then remove the com.apple.Safari.plist file from the ~/Library/Preferences folder.

...and then set up the pref's and toolbar again because that'll cause it all to reset to the defaults.

But it should be the last time.