17 ms·

Apple Safari users suffer crashes

78 points by SlashmanX 11y ago

sgtnasty 11y ago
Works fine for me (Mac OS X), and I guess am one of the few who prefers Safari.
- yoz-y 11y ago
  Works for me as well. Are you by any chance using duck duck go as your default search provider?
  - Sheepsteak 11y ago
    Works fine for me too and I'm using DuckDuckGo on both iOS and Mac.
    - kiwijamo 11y ago
      I use DuckDuckGo as well and I was affected by this.
- jeroen 11y ago
  Works fine for me on OSX as well, but since this morning all our iOS devices have the browser crash when tapping the address bar.
- coldcode 11y ago
  No problem at work or at home. Must be something we don't have.
SlashmanX 11y ago
Appears to be caused be search suggestions in Safari address bar, which seems to be server side so it's affecting various versions of software. Reddit thread linked in article: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/42wle1/safari_crashing_after_ios_921_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/42wle1/safari_crashi...
grabcocque 11y ago
The bug may have been uncovered by a server change, but Safari really shouldn't be crashing just because it can't reach the suggestions server. That is, frankly, pisspoor QA by Apple.
- kozukumi 11y ago
  It isn't just crashing Safari but does a full OS reboot on my 5c running 9.2.1 (which is the latest release iOS version as of today).
  - SlashmanX 11y ago
    It's also affecting the Settings search apparently
  - fulafel 11y ago
    Yep. Hence it's barking the wrong tree to frame this as primarily Safari's fault.
untog 11y ago
Sometimes I really worry how much I depend on software written by Apple. On the weirder end of Safari bugs, mine can only open t.co (Twitter short link) URLs about 1/4 of the time. The rest of the time it sits there, eventually telling me the server is not responding. Apparently it is a bug at a "lower level than Webkit". The mind boggles as to what it actually is, and it's been like this for months. http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/22/10813862/Safari-sucks-at-twitter http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/22/10813862/Safari-sucks-at-t...
- k-mcgrady 11y ago
  This was driving me mad for ages. I was blaming Twitter and my connection until I finally discovered it was Safari. This was the last straw for me. Having Safari on my desktop synced with my iPhone is so useful. Safari credit card and password storage works better than Chromes (imo) and I find it superior in almost every other way. But with todays issue, the t.co issue, and another issue where my entire Mac would randomly freeze and require a forced reboot on some videos (not sure if it was flash or HTML5) I've just had to give up and switch to Chrome.
  - untog 11y ago
    They both show worrying things to me: - app crashing because a remote server is down? Bad coding. Bad QA. What else is lurking in that codebase? - weird bug affecting one domain? Fix it. Twitter is not a small site. But it's been months and they still haven't fixed it.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >app crashing because a remote server is down? Bad coding. Bad QA. What else is lurking in that codebase? That happens all the time with all kinds of apps, which nethertheless might be indispensable.
      - untog 11y ago
        If only it were open source, then we could check.
autoreleasepool 11y ago
I've tried to like Safari. It's certainly snappier than the alternatives. It's fast and seems light. I'll go as far as to say I want to like Safari. As a heavy iPhone and Mac user, going all in on Safari would buy me a lot. In a similar vein, I want to like Firefox - even more so than Safari. An open source web browser by a non-profit? Sign me up. That's an excellent concept to rally behind. But... I can't ditch Chrome. I know it eats up resources like it's nobody's business, I know it's probably tracking me, I hate that it wants me to 'log in' like it's some sort of operating system, but I just can't kick the habit. I think it's the tabs. For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions. It's also the best file downloader, the most configurable, has the best extension ecosystem. It manages to be the best pro-user's browser, and the best layperson's browser at the same time. I still have all three browsers sitting in my dock. I just use Chrome by default.
- diggan 11y ago
  I can't ditch Firefox for the exact same reason! I NEED to have my tabs on the left side or the right side. I can't have it in the top because I end up not seeing any titles, just favicons, and that doesn't really give me anything. Try the Firefox Developer Edition or Aurora (Alpha channel, rarely crashes but the performance is much better than current stable) together with TreeStyleTabs. Maybe that will help you out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  - FungalRaincloud 11y ago
    I recently installed vimium on chrome, and being able to quick navigate to a specific tab via keyboard (by typing the title or selecting it from a list) has completely eradicated my issue with finding tabs on chrome. There's something like vimium on Firefox, but I haven't really looked into it. I mainly use chrome because I use chrome. I just don't feel like putting the energy into setting up Firefox how I like it. currently, my chrome history is synced between a bunch of devices nicely. Between setting up that and having to find alternatives to all the addons I use, making the switch just doesn't sound fun.
xiaq 11y ago
As someone owning an iPad Air and thus forced to use mobile Safari, this is hardly any news for me. Back in 7.1 scrolling or zooming a page "too fast" led to an immediate crash. Onto 8.0, it still did but the threshold was apparently raised a bit. It was finally fixed before 9.0 but now fullscreen HTML5 video playing starts to crash randomly. Even worse, sometimes the page just goes blank and you have to reload it - The last time this happened I had spent five minutes filling a form. Hilariously, the preview interface still shows the actual page, so I managed to click the submit button by mapping its position from the preview.
amelius 11y ago
Anybody else noticed how Safari doesn't seem to get Javascript exceptions right? Errors often have no stack trace, or their information is of limited use. At least, that is what I am experiencing lately. Chrome/Chromium, on the other hand, almost always gives me the information I need.
- acdha 11y ago
  No, but if you're relying on sourcemaps to get useful information you might want to confirm that the toolchain is producing fully-valid sourcemaps. I saw some very odd failures while that stabilized.
rplnt 11y ago
Opera trying to capitalize https://twitter.com/coastbrowser/status/692367086631391232 https://twitter.com/coastbrowser/status/692367086631391232
adajos 11y ago
This is pretty sad Apple.
sleepyhead 11y ago
I haven't experienced this issue but the last month I have been getting a lot of tabs crashing and reloading. Anyone else with the same problem? It's not related to any particular site. Some text about the page had a problem and had to be reloaded is displayed in a status bar above the page beneath the tabs.
mbillie1 11y ago
Safari needs to start respecting HTML5 input validations.
- coldtea 11y ago
  From all the things mentioned in this post, that's probably the last thing it needs. Most browsers out in the wild don't support them anyway, and that's something for developers to worry -- most pages implement their own JS based validations on the client anyway.
sprite 11y ago
I experienced this issue earlier today. I assumed my Safari had gotten corrupted somehow, crazy that a serverside issue would bring down the browser like that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CrowFly 11y ago
I thought Apple software was supposed to be "secure by design" and immune to buffer overruns, etc.
xedarius 11y ago
Still broke on my iPhone. Not sure a server change should break my iPhone internets, very poor.
Razengan 11y ago
No issues here on the latest El Capitan and iOS. Though I wonder if this isn't "accidental" sabotage on Google's part. Wouldn't be the first time. Didn't something from their side break something just for Apple users not long ago? But then again, they have lots of Mac users inside their own company..
joesmo 11y ago
Upon upgrading to Yosemite two years ago, Safari stopped working completely on two out of my three Macs (one brand new, bought just months before) with the third one intermittently working. Apple's software quality is really a joke and Safari is the new IE in many ways. Its support for standards is behind every other major browser and it hardly ever opens without crashing. Why would I use such shitty software when I'm not forced to? I avoid iTunes for the exact same reasons except when Apple forces me to use it to put music on their devices. The core OS X system is generally solid (other than the myriad of wireless issues Apple can't seem to ever solve) but the apps that come with it range from substandard to total shit quality.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

78 points by SlashmanX 11y ago

sgtnasty 11y ago

Works fine for me (Mac OS X), and I guess am one of the few who prefers Safari.

yoz-y 11y ago
Works for me as well. Are you by any chance using duck duck go as your default search provider?
- Sheepsteak 11y ago
  Works fine for me too and I'm using DuckDuckGo on both iOS and Mac.
  - kiwijamo 11y ago
    I use DuckDuckGo as well and I was affected by this.
jeroen 11y ago
Works fine for me on OSX as well, but since this morning all our iOS devices have the browser crash when tapping the address bar.
coldcode 11y ago
No problem at work or at home. Must be something we don't have.

SlashmanX 11y ago

Appears to be caused be search suggestions in Safari address bar, which seems to be server side so it's affecting various versions of software. Reddit thread linked in article: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/42wle1/safari_crashing_after_ios_921_update/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/42wle1/safari_crashi...

grabcocque 11y ago

The bug may have been uncovered by a server change, but Safari really shouldn't be crashing just because it can't reach the suggestions server. That is, frankly, pisspoor QA by Apple.

kozukumi 11y ago
It isn't just crashing Safari but does a full OS reboot on my 5c running 9.2.1 (which is the latest release iOS version as of today).
- SlashmanX 11y ago
  It's also affecting the Settings search apparently
- fulafel 11y ago
  Yep. Hence it's barking the wrong tree to frame this as primarily Safari's fault.

untog 11y ago

Sometimes I really worry how much I depend on software written by Apple. On the weirder end of Safari bugs, mine can only open t.co (Twitter short link) URLs about 1/4 of the time. The rest of the time it sits there, eventually telling me the server is not responding. Apparently it is a bug at a "lower level than Webkit". The mind boggles as to what it actually is, and it's been like this for months. http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/22/10813862/Safari-sucks-at-twitter http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/22/10813862/Safari-sucks-at-t...

k-mcgrady 11y ago
This was driving me mad for ages. I was blaming Twitter and my connection until I finally discovered it was Safari. This was the last straw for me. Having Safari on my desktop synced with my iPhone is so useful. Safari credit card and password storage works better than Chromes (imo) and I find it superior in almost every other way. But with todays issue, the t.co issue, and another issue where my entire Mac would randomly freeze and require a forced reboot on some videos (not sure if it was flash or HTML5) I've just had to give up and switch to Chrome.
- untog 11y ago
  They both show worrying things to me: - app crashing because a remote server is down? Bad coding. Bad QA. What else is lurking in that codebase? - weird bug affecting one domain? Fix it. Twitter is not a small site. But it's been months and they still haven't fixed it.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >app crashing because a remote server is down? Bad coding. Bad QA. What else is lurking in that codebase? That happens all the time with all kinds of apps, which nethertheless might be indispensable.
    - untog 11y ago
      If only it were open source, then we could check.

autoreleasepool 11y ago

I've tried to like Safari. It's certainly snappier than the alternatives. It's fast and seems light. I'll go as far as to say I want to like Safari. As a heavy iPhone and Mac user, going all in on Safari would buy me a lot. In a similar vein, I want to like Firefox - even more so than Safari. An open source web browser by a non-profit? Sign me up. That's an excellent concept to rally behind. But... I can't ditch Chrome. I know it eats up resources like it's nobody's business, I know it's probably tracking me, I hate that it wants me to 'log in' like it's some sort of operating system, but I just can't kick the habit. I think it's the tabs. For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions. It's also the best file downloader, the most configurable, has the best extension ecosystem. It manages to be the best pro-user's browser, and the best layperson's browser at the same time. I still have all three browsers sitting in my dock. I just use Chrome by default.

diggan 11y ago
I can't ditch Firefox for the exact same reason! I NEED to have my tabs on the left side or the right side. I can't have it in the top because I end up not seeing any titles, just favicons, and that doesn't really give me anything. Try the Firefox Developer Edition or Aurora (Alpha channel, rarely crashes but the performance is much better than current stable) together with TreeStyleTabs. Maybe that will help you out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- FungalRaincloud 11y ago
  I recently installed vimium on chrome, and being able to quick navigate to a specific tab via keyboard (by typing the title or selecting it from a list) has completely eradicated my issue with finding tabs on chrome. There's something like vimium on Firefox, but I haven't really looked into it. I mainly use chrome because I use chrome. I just don't feel like putting the energy into setting up Firefox how I like it. currently, my chrome history is synced between a bunch of devices nicely. Between setting up that and having to find alternatives to all the addons I use, making the switch just doesn't sound fun.

xiaq 11y ago

As someone owning an iPad Air and thus forced to use mobile Safari, this is hardly any news for me. Back in 7.1 scrolling or zooming a page "too fast" led to an immediate crash. Onto 8.0, it still did but the threshold was apparently raised a bit. It was finally fixed before 9.0 but now fullscreen HTML5 video playing starts to crash randomly. Even worse, sometimes the page just goes blank and you have to reload it - The last time this happened I had spent five minutes filling a form. Hilariously, the preview interface still shows the actual page, so I managed to click the submit button by mapping its position from the preview.

amelius 11y ago

Anybody else noticed how Safari doesn't seem to get Javascript exceptions right? Errors often have no stack trace, or their information is of limited use. At least, that is what I am experiencing lately. Chrome/Chromium, on the other hand, almost always gives me the information I need.

acdha 11y ago
No, but if you're relying on sourcemaps to get useful information you might want to confirm that the toolchain is producing fully-valid sourcemaps. I saw some very odd failures while that stabilized.

rplnt 11y ago

Opera trying to capitalize https://twitter.com/coastbrowser/status/692367086631391232 https://twitter.com/coastbrowser/status/692367086631391232

adajos 11y ago

This is pretty sad Apple.

sleepyhead 11y ago

I haven't experienced this issue but the last month I have been getting a lot of tabs crashing and reloading. Anyone else with the same problem? It's not related to any particular site. Some text about the page had a problem and had to be reloaded is displayed in a status bar above the page beneath the tabs.

mbillie1 11y ago

Safari needs to start respecting HTML5 input validations.

coldtea 11y ago
From all the things mentioned in this post, that's probably the last thing it needs. Most browsers out in the wild don't support them anyway, and that's something for developers to worry -- most pages implement their own JS based validations on the client anyway.

sprite 11y ago

I experienced this issue earlier today. I assumed my Safari had gotten corrupted somehow, crazy that a serverside issue would bring down the browser like that.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

CrowFly 11y ago

I thought Apple software was supposed to be "secure by design" and immune to buffer overruns, etc.

xedarius 11y ago

Still broke on my iPhone. Not sure a server change should break my iPhone internets, very poor.

Razengan 11y ago

No issues here on the latest El Capitan and iOS. Though I wonder if this isn't "accidental" sabotage on Google's part. Wouldn't be the first time. Didn't something from their side break something just for Apple users not long ago? But then again, they have lots of Mac users inside their own company..

joesmo 11y ago

Upon upgrading to Yosemite two years ago, Safari stopped working completely on two out of my three Macs (one brand new, bought just months before) with the third one intermittently working. Apple's software quality is really a joke and Safari is the new IE in many ways. Its support for standards is behind every other major browser and it hardly ever opens without crashing. Why would I use such shitty software when I'm not forced to? I avoid iTunes for the exact same reasons except when Apple forces me to use it to put music on their devices. The core OS X system is generally solid (other than the myriad of wireless issues Apple can't seem to ever solve) but the apps that come with it range from substandard to total shit quality.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]