Technical: Mac OS 10.15, research hints only spinning wheel, no records

bestlediardhodgins

I have upgraded my Mac to OS 10.15 and now ‘research hints’ continually displays searching wheel and no hints.  There are blue squares on records indicating there are records available for that person.

C Lethaby

@bestlediardhodgins - a few questions (I'm on a Mac).

1. what browser are you using. FamilySearch does not play nice with Safari. I use Chrome only for when working with FamilySearch.
2. Have you cleared cookies recently. Although we don't need to do it as often on a Mac, we sometimes still need to do that.
3. This link helps you just clear/delete FamilySearch cookies. https://www.familysearch.org/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-delete-cookies-from-familysearch
4. Let me know if this doesn't work and we'll keep trying!

bestlediardhodgins

Hi C Lethaby: I am on Safari 13.1; I cleared FS cookies but hints still not open; switched to Chrome and research help/hints working fine; thank you for your prompt answer; is there any point in letting Apple know? I prefer Safari to Chrome. Susan Best

Gordon Collett

I strictly use Safari for FamilySearch with one exception and have not had any trouble. Reporting problems to Apple won't help because the operating system and browser set the rules and programmers need to follow them, not the other way around.

Currently on my laptop I have macOS 10.15.7 with Safari 14.0 and attaching hints works just fine. Be sure you are upgraded all the way to those versions and see if that helps.

Next step would be turn off all extensions in Safari. If you have any that were poorly written, they may be the problem. See here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203051 As this article says, get rid of any plug-ins.

This would also go for any other type of third-party utilities you might have running. Try turning all of them off or starting up in safe mode ( https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/start-up-your-mac-in-safe-mode-mh21245/mac ) and see if attaching hints then works.

Then a consideration would be your anti-viral software if any and whether it is not playing nicely with the software.

Lastly, and I hate to even bring this up, how old is your machine? It is an unfortunate fact of life that processors and operating systems improve. Programming advances to take advantage of the new system. Then the cycle repeats. After enough years, older processors get left behind and just can't handle programming requirements anymore. If you are on Safari 13.1 because your machine cannot update to 14.0, you may be reaching that point.

The exception I mentioned above for which I use Firefox is here in Community. In Safari the image controls (resizing or deleting an image among others) do not work. I can't even get them to appear. I haven't bothered reporting this because this Communities software, which as far as I am aware is not a FamilySearch product, has so many much bigger problems, such as basic navigation, that the programmers need to be working on.

bestlediardhodgins

Problem solved! Updated OS 10.15.7, Safari 14.1.2 = help/hints working. Thank You.

My computer: 8 years desktop, was working fine with OS 10.14+ then hard drive had to be replaced and when unit returned OS 10.15, because this was only three weeks ago I didn't think to check for updates.