Safari 10.1 crashes while scrolling

[eford]

I've been experiencing frequent and recurring crashes on my 2008 iMac (Yosemite) while using Safari (10.1). I believe I have narrowed down the cause to my use of a zoomed-in view (x3) combined with a single-finger scrolling gesture. When my system crashes everything goes dark, including the lights on my USB hub, and I can hear the internal harddrive cycling as if attempting to restart. However, the system does not restart on its own and I have to do a forced reboot. Upon restart, I let the previous windows reopen and, once Safari is back up on the same page, I was able to scroll by dragging the vertical scrollbar or by clicking in the scrollbar region. However, as soon as I tried a finger swipe (even a very slow one) my system immediately went dark, again. I went thru another forced restart and window restore then, when Safari was back up and on the same page, I reset the view (Cmd+0) to actual size and was able to scroll up and down using gestures without experiencing another crash. It may be too soon to declare my problem "solved", however, since these crashes have previously been occurring on any number of other web pages. This particular occurrence happened while viewing an article on KrebsOnSecurity regarding the use of VPNs.