help cant work out why when i use safari

[Lizzylid]

i can open a website but then cant navigate round the site. not a techy so really struggling

 

[maw_walker]

Are there any sites in particular or just one or two? When you say "can't navigate", do you mean you can't click on links?

 

[Lizzylid]

Are there any sites in particular or just one or two? When you say "can't navigate", do you mean you can't click on links?

when i arrive at the website i try to click on things like sighn in and buy and absolutely nothing will work, so far its been two sites but thats all i have tried so far. Also my emails went funny in terms of i received the title of the email but no content, this has now come back since i rebooted.

 

[maw_walker]

What 2 sites and what do you mean by "nothing will work"? Do you mean clicking on anything on the page does nothing? What version of MacOS/OSX are you running? You can find out by clicking on the Apple icon at the top, left of the screen and selecting "About this Mac".

 

[Lizzylid]

i am running Catalina 10.15.7 since rebooting it looks like some at least of the site s have started to be able to use

 

[maw_walker]

OK, well that's good. Do you have any Safari extensions installed? I can't help but wonder if one of those is misbehaving.

 

[TonyAguila]

I’ve been getting a lot of unresponsive links/buttons in Safari in Monterey beta. I’m trying Safari Technology Preview (again) to see if it works better.

 

[maw_walker]

Interesting, I’ve never had that issue. I’ll keep it in mind though. I do get the occasional page that doesn’t display correctly, typically my company time card site, but a reload fixes it.

 

[Lizzylid]

Im afraid i dont know what a safari extension is? as i said i'm really ignorant about it all, my tech support doesn't know anything about macs as he works on microsoft , so i hate asking

 

[maw_walker]

Well, if everything is working fine, I would say leave it alone, but if you are curious, with Safari. open, you can click on "Safari" --> "Preferences" --> "Extensions" to see what if anything, is installed. That's not going to be helpful unless you don't recognize something installed, remove the extension and the problem goes away.

You mentioned things seem to have cleared up so probably safer to continue as normal.

 

[TonyAguila]

I have been noticing lately that in a number of websites in Safari (and Safati Technology Preview) some links are not responding. You can tell if the cursor does not turn into the pointing hand. I found that in most cases, these links work in other web browsers. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is Apple’s focus on security.

It’s good practice to have several alternate browsers installed on your Mac, e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Edge. At the moment, I really like (Microsoft) Edge.

To make it easier to change over on the fly to another browser, open Preferences in Safari, click on Advanced, and on the bottom click on the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” checkbox. Now you will have the “Develop” item in the Safari menubar.

The next time you encounter a non-responsive link, select Develop -> Open Page With -> and choose a browser from the list (assuming you have other browsers installed). The Safari page should then open in the new browser. Test to see if that link will now work. If not, try another browser. Good luck.

 

[maw_walker]

I suspect these issues have to do with Javascript which I abhor but it is a necessary evil in todays web. Many web site designers do not have a security focus when designing apps butI applaud Apple's security focus, so there very well may be instances where some things don't work. The web is pretty much the Wild West in terms of what is out there.

 

[TonyAguila]

Agreed. And that’s the reason why I chose Safari/Safari Technology Preview for my web browsers. However, especially with Monterey, some pages I routinely visit, like Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes, take too long to load, or simply hang indefinitely. This is when the Develop menu option is most useful.

I do have JavaScript enabled, as well as the “Hide IP address -> from Trackers and Websites” option in Privacy, which is probably the cause of most of the connectivity problems.

 

[maw_walker]

Ah ok, I wondered what "Monterey" was . I have been using Linux and BSD as a desktop for about a decade and a half so am not interested in working with anything that changes rapidly. I moved to Mac for the stability. Thank you for testing though!

 

[Lizzylid]

Thank you for the advice, very helpful and i will look at getting another browser. Its good to have advice that i can actually understand.
so thanks all.