TextEdit, Safari, WhatsApp not responding, it all came back

By Mert Ozer, 6 April, 2025

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

Hi folks,
I’m not happy to tell you, but I’ve been running into all these “TextEdit, Safari, WhatsApp not responding” bugs way more frequently lately. It all came back with macOS 15.4. And don’t even get me started on the annoying navigation bugs on the ChatGPT site that showed up with this update—15.4 is straight-up trash. I only installed it because it supposedly fixed the Apple Music issues with voiceover, but of course, it brought a whole new batch of problems. I don’t know, I’m on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro that’s capable of doing anything at light speed no matter what you throw at it, and I’m still getting these errors. It’s not the apps or my machine—it’s 100% a VoiceOver issue. I don’t have a Time Machine backup since I don’t have an SSD or a flash drive that’s large enough. How can I go back to 15.3.2 without losing anything on my system? My computer came with 15.1, so what if I install it from Disk Utility without removing my current data—would that even work?

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Comments

By Maldalain on Monday, April 7, 2025 - 05:21

Try any Pages document, navigate to the next or previous text attribute. Pages will not respond and you have to force it to stotp!

By Jason White on Monday, April 7, 2025 - 05:21

First, I'm not encountering this issue in 15.4, suggesting that there's something specific to your system or configuration which is responsible.

Second, I think people who are experiencing these issues might do well to run actual support cases with Apple, escalating them all the way to Apple's engineering department if necessary. I've had a support case at one point (not accessibility-related) that would have resulted in diagnostics being given to the engineering department if the work-around I ultimately used hadn't worked.

I know it requires time and patience, but I think real support tickets (not just e-mail to Apple Accessibility) will be needed, and if anyone has connections with Apple accessibility leadership, they should be taken up as well. Perhaps contacting an accessibility advocacy group about some of the issues discussed here would also be a good idea, as they have contacts and approaches not available to individual users.