Last Monday suddenly no webpage would load in any of the standard browsers anymore. This was in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. All fully updated. Every webpage's tab displayed the spinning loading wheel forever and browsing was completely impossible. The same applied to the App Store application: it wouldn't load. Only the Tor browser still worked. All this on a brandnew MacBook Air running OSX.9.3.
After a looong search it turned out that SAV – which I installed on my Macs 4/5 years ago – was the culprit (SAV 9.0.11).
In SAV > Preferences > Web protection > General you will find 2 switches that are set to 'on' by default. Turning those off and on again got all browsers back online.
That only works temporarily, however. Because within 24 hours the same bug reared its head again. Twice! And 3 times the next day!
Although it's easy enough to solve this problem – if you know what it is... – it is always disruptive and takes time. That's a royal PITA!
I contacted and notified Sophos AV support but they were not interested unless I paid up (for a bug that I found, and a [partial] solution that I suggested...).
Today this SAV bug also wrecked web browsing on a 7 year old MacBook Pro running OSX.6.9. That's when I had had enough: I have deactivated SAV on all my Macs and will be looking around for an alternative. I suggest you do that too.
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