This is the second time I’ve posted about this and by the looks of it I’m not the only one. Safari keeps randomly opening my homepage in a new tab (my homepage is http://espn.go.com/, if that matters), interrupting whatever I am doing, every like 3 minutes to 30 minutes or so - as far as I can tell it’s a completely random recurrence. I use a side by side window configuration most of the time when I’m working in Safari (my job has me filling out web forms most of the day) - sometimes this happens in an inactive window, sometimes in the active window. Inactive window is just distracting, when it happens in the active window it also steals focus, interrupting whatever I am typing, and I have to close out the new tab to get back to what I was doing. Searching on this forum and googling suggests it is probably some sort of malware. The only Safari extension I even have is 1Password. I installed Malwarebytes and ran it, found 2 issues that it resolved but did not fix the problem. To top it off, now Safari has suddenly stopped labeling my browser tabs (see attached image). I’m so over this. Would it fix anything if I just uninstalled Safari entirely and reinstalled fresh? Would this have any other implications I would need to consider? This is totally crippling my productivity.
It is interesting you mention ESPN. I have seen similar behavior, where Safari switches to the tab with ESPN, for a as of yet undetermined reason. I’ve not seen it if ESPN is not open (ESPN is not my home page).
So as a suggestion, try setting your homepage to something other than ESPN and see if that changes things.
Done. Thanks for the tip… can’t say I’m optimistic this will fix it after everything else has failed but I sure hope it does!
One thing that might be worth trying is to create another user account on your Mac and use it for a little while. If the problem doesn’t happen when you’re logged in with that account then it would be a strong indicator that the problem is account and not Safari related. This sounds like a malware issue, but it’d be weird (or malfunctioning (no pun intended)) malware that only opens tabs to your homepage. Good luck!
maybe try running this?:
Note that the original poster wrote, “I installed Malwarebytes and ran it, found 2 issues that it resolved but did not fix the problem.”. 
For fun (fun not included) I opened Safari with two tabs, one of which was ESPN, and selected the other as frontmost. Sure enough, after a while the ta … it just happened again while I was typing this! … b with ESPN switched to frontmost.
So I’m guessing ESPN is the culprit here.
Thanks for pointing that out…
I would also try running Malware Bytes again. Some infections are extremely persistent and may reinstall themselves after incomplete removal. This is rare, but it’s an easy and non-destructive thing to do.
Yes, this is wild, right?! I haven’t noticed this occurring since I changed my homepage a few days ago. Seems it was the problem all along. How intrusive!!! ESPN!! I thought we were cool!!! 