Internet Explorer Doesn't Open and Safari Unexpectedly Quits

P.S. here is some good general Mac OS X troubleshooting advice:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

Thanks. I'll try this and get back to you. My client has OS 10.2.8


Kara

Also make sure your client has at least 15% of her drive free. Macs do funny things when the drives get full.

In the past, reinstalling the OS resolved the issues like this with Safari, LimeWire was a culprit in this... from what I gathered on that particular system. Microsoft has abandoned support and updates of IE for the Mac so I wouldn't recomend that. Your better off with the Opera browser on the Mac over IE IMHO!

Best of Luck!

P.S. You can do a re-install and have your data left untouched, just make sure you don't do a "clean" install

Hi,

I traced a similar issue (but affecting all internet apps I tried) to a corrupt Internet Config preferences file. Try moving the files "com.apple.internetconfig.plist" and "com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist" out of the ~/Library/Preferences folder to another folder (eg. the desktop), log out and log in again, and see if the problem persists. If the problem is still there, put the files back, if not, delete them. The client will have to re-specify some settings, like the default web browser, email client, etc.

Internet Config also holds a bunch of other settings related to Internet apps, so if she has a lot of special settings, it might take a while to get everything back to normal. There shouldn't be any serious side effects, but if you're paranoid, make a backup of the files.

HTH.


       Sverre

Try zapping the preferences files concerned with IE and Safari.  They are in ~/Library/Preferences also and are called

com.apple.Safari.plist
and
com.microsoft.explorer.plist

Your bookmarks should be ok (which seems to be the main thing people worry about when deleting preferences).

One question:  Is your user trying to see a particular kind of file, such as a PDF linked from an email?  If so it may be something to do with the file being downloaded rather than the browser per se.  For example sometimes Safari gets confused about where it is downloaded PDF's (fixable by going into Safari's preferences and resetting the download location).  You can also check the Internet Plug-Ins folder both for your user (~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins) and the machine (/Library/Internet Plug-Ins)

Ian

Thank you Strung for you help. My client hasn't gotten back to me, so I didn't want to hold you up with your points. You gave me some good advice in general, whether I use it for this client or not. Thank you.