Fixing Safari’s “This Webpage Reloaded” Error on macOS with AdGuard Home DNS

I’ve been using AdGuard Home as a DNS relay with Google Nest WiFi (2nd Gen), and over the past year, I noticed that Safari on macOS would occasionally stop loading pages, displaying a vague error message: “This webpage reloaded because a problem occurred.” After that, all future requests would lead to a blank page. It did not help to flush the DNS cache and restart Safari with: sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder.

Interestingly, Chrome remained unaffected and continued to function normally, even when Safari refused to load pages. The only solution I found to get Safari to load pages once it entered this state was to restart my machine.

Recently, I made a small change in AdGuard Home’s DNS settings that might have resolved the issue. Under Upstream DNS servers, I switched from making single DNS requests to parallel requests. Since then, I haven’t encountered the Safari problem. If the issue returns, I’ll update this post, but for now, this adjustment appears to have fixed my issue. 🤞

Hopefully, this helps others with a similar setup who are experiencing the same Safari issue!