Macs crashing(restarting) due to web browsing

[denmoff]

I have a bunch of iMac14,1 and MacBookPro11,1 models where some are having regular kernel panics almost once per day. Reading thru the kernel panic logs, i'm finding that they're all very similar and seem to point to the graphics card and com.apple.webkit or plugin-container as the cause. They're mostly all on 10.10.5 with one exception being on 10.11.4. I suspect the crashes are happening when hardware acceleration is being used by the browser(either safari or firefox). I'm planning to test this theory today by disabling hardware acceleration. Here's what most of the kernel panics look like.

Is anyone else noticing a high incidence of panics among these two models of Mac? I'm thinking it's related to the Intel Iris graphics chipset.

[mikeh]

Yes indeed; this has been happening off-and-on to me and a couple users for the past month.

Late last week Adobe published an update to Flash to "resolve a bug that was impacting certain Mac video cards." The panic logs that I was able to inspect had the Flash Player plugin in the backtrace.

Hope that helps!

[denmoff]

@mikeh Thanks. Do you happen to remember the exact models that this was affecting?

[kstrick]

I"ve had something similar, and so far it seemed like firefox was involved (Firefox was their primary browser and Firefox has process called plugin container)... with 10.10.5 systems, haven't had a 10.11 system do it yet (one 10.9.5) system.)

in the ones i've had like that, shutdown cause was -62 which is a watchdog issue (hearbeat failure)

[mikeh]

@denmoff I haven't tracked that info down, sorry. Anecdotally, Retina MacBook Pros seem to be the likely class of machines.