Safari on Monterey Guests

Discussion in 'macOS Virtual Machine' started by tannebil, May 13, 2022.

  1. tannebil

    tannebil Junior Member

    Messages:
    10
    I've been successfully running macOS guests for many years with Parallels but I've run into a serious problem running Safari on Monterey guests on a Monterey host. The host is a MM2018 with 64GB of RAM running 12.3.1 and the guest is running the same macOS release.

    The problem is that Safari launches and is responsive until I actually try to browse a page. At that point, the page content freezes as does the scroll bar. Eventually, the screen will update and the scroll bar will resume. The length of the freeze seems to depend on the specifics of the content but is always 5+ seconds.

    Safari works fine on a Mojave guest running on the same host. As I recall, Safari ran poorly on Big Sur guest/Monterey host but I wasn't using it much and then made the mistake (in hindsight) of upgrading that guest to Monterey.

    To verify the problem, I created a new Monterey guest from the recovery partition on the host (Parallels said it was creating the machine using an Internet download). It went mostly OK although it froze on the final reboot into the new guest requiring a "reset" to get going and did the same after installing Parallels Tools. It also locks up the host for 5-10 seconds when booting (a problem noted by others that I've had mixed success with avoiding using "prlctl set <machine name> --video-adapter-type parallels" to change the video driver).

    Anyway, after the machine is created, I let Spotlight finish doing it's thing and I launch Safari first time. All the menu controls and the scrollbar work. I enter speedtest.xfinity.com into the address bar. The page appears as expected but the scroll bar is frozen while the Safari menu controls are fine. I click on the Test Speed button and nothing happens for about 30 seconds when the screen updates with an "in-progess" number and then 90 seconds later with the final result is shown (download speed is 200Mpbs). When I do the same test in Safari on the host, as soon as I press "Test Speed", the screen immediately changes, shows a test animation (which never shows on the guest) and updates a digital speedometer regularly until the test completes in about 25 seconds (download speed is 600Mbps). I tried Facebook.com and cnn.com and got similarly terrible results with the screen updating fitfully and the scroll bar not working. It tried google.com and when I typed something into the search box, none of the characters appeared for about 20 seconds.

    I've run Activity Monitor while repeating the tests and nothing interesting shows I've tried switching the hypervisor between Apple and Parallels, I've tried both the Apple and Parallels video drivers, I've tried an alternate guest network card, and both bridge/shared networks. I've run Activity Monitor while doing the tests and the CPU does briefly spike to 200% between "Safari Networking" and "kernel_task", it's only for a couple of seconds in the middle of the screen freeze. The scroll bar remains semi-frozen at the end of the test.

    Before I start the process of creating a ticket, I thought I'd see if anybody else is seeing the problem or has seen it and found a resolution.
     
  2. tannebil

    tannebil Junior Member

    Messages:
    10
  3. tannebil

    tannebil Junior Member

    Messages:
    10
    Switching to Chrome and disabling Hardware Acceleration seems to have done the trick.
     
    DavidC109 likes this.
  4. DavidC109

    DavidC109 Bit poster

    Messages:
    2
    I confirm @tannebil's workaround works, and is the usable browsing solution that I have found. And the new update Parallels Desktop version
    17.1.3 (51565) does not fix this.
     
  5. karlemilnikka

    karlemilnikka Member

    Messages:
    42
    Firefox is broken as well and disabling hardware acceleration doesn't help.
     
  6. DavidC109

    DavidC109 Bit poster

    Messages:
    2
    The new update Parallels Desktop version 17.1.4 (51567) does not fix it either.
     
  7. Asish

    Asish Staff Member

    Messages:
    193
    Hello, Please refer to the KB article to disable 3D acceleration and check.
     
  8. karlemilnikka

    karlemilnikka Member

    Messages:
    42
    I can confirm it's still broken.

    You removed this option in Parallels Desktop 15. Please put it back if you want us to test it.
     
    DudleyS likes this.

Share This Page