Safari won't start

Since the search doesn't work, i'll just jump ahead and ask.

My friend has an iMac (Leopard) and her Safari won't start. Now, I have experience with Windows and Ubuntu, but with Mac... Only skin deep.

Could you instruct me on how to diagnose and solve this problem?

 

Go to ~/Library/Preferences and delete com.apple.Safari.plist. If that does not fix it, trash Safari.app and re-copy from the OS X installation DVD.

 

I'll give it a shot. But this is rather curious behaviour. What causes this?

 

I just encountered the same problem with Safari. It starts to open but never fully finishes and it just hangs. I looked for com.apple.Safari.plist but there was no file with this name. Any ideas on how I can get Safari working again?

 

you can't just search for it as normal, it is a System file by nature so won't normally show up in a Spotlight search, which is actually a good thing overall.

you have to go and look for it specifically in the directories or change the rules of your search by adding more variables.

as mentioned the best starting point is to put the preference file in the trash, and if that doesn't do the trick, trash the app all together, before you do that, see if you can use another browser to just download the latest version of Safari, so once it's trashed it can be re-installed.

it is most likely this is a user generated issue, either based on the files or apps on the system, or a number of different things that could have happened.

and for the record, Restart? always let us know if that always fun option has been explored or not.

 

Using the Finder, navigate to ~/Library/Preferences, inside of that folder you should see com.apple.Safari.plist and com.apple.Safari.RSS.plist, try trashing the first one and then open Safari to see if that gets it going.

Also, before trashing the application you could also try navigating to ~/Library and rename the Safari folder to Safari.old and re-launch Safari to see if that resolves it.

 

I am completely new to the Mac OS having used PCs for many years. I don't see how to use Finder to locate the files so instead I clicked on the HD icon and went into Library/Preferences directory that way. Neither of those files were listed in the directory, in fact there were no files with Safari in the filenames. Is it possible that Safari has been corrupted and this is why the files don't exist? If you think I'm missing something would you please send me step by step instructions or any other ideas? Much appreciated !

 

you are looking at the root of your HD rather than your User folder that is the problem.

instead of double clicking the HD icon on the desktop (which is just opening up a Finder window), you can do the same by just clicking Finder on the left side of your dock. If you open a window from the icon on your dock, it will actually take you right to your User folder, you should see, Desktop, Documents, Library, Music, Movies, etc, etc. Open up that Library folder, each user of the computer will have one, as will the root HD (the operating system) itself.

In the Library folder you should find the file mentioned above, you can just drag it to the trash, now when you try to start Safari again, it it will automatically recreate that preference file, and could possibly solve your problem.

I would defintely recommend checking out Apple's website www.apple.com/support or even just the Mac section for many video tutorials to get yourself started.

 

Thanks for letting me know about getting into Library through the dock. I'm more used to working directly in the root directories so this is different for me. Deleting the file was the answer. Thanks for your help and I'll check out those tutorials