9 ms·

A problem repeatedly occurred with Safari 14.1

136 points by sgloutnikov 5y ago

sgloutnikov 5y ago
Another discussion at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/safari-14-1-is-completely-unusable.2293717/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/safari-14-1-is-complete...
- lnwlebjel 5y ago
  ... which is also unreadable with Safari!
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    No, it renders perfectly.
    - masswerk 5y ago
      Same here (Big Sur 11.3 / M1), also ebay, etc work perfectly. It seems to be a rather erratic problem. (Maybe, it's related to some framework corruption and the advice to reinstall isn't that bad, after all?)
junon 5y ago
The seniors on there that are beside themselves unable to use some of their sites is something I think of when designing software. Your users aren't always tech savvy. Sometimes quite the opposite. A single change, even if it isn't a bug, can render your program unusable by some because it's so different.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  At least communicate. Users aren't stupid but they approach the web with fear most of the time, so anything out of the ordinary is a sign of a problem they don't understand nor know how to restore and most of the time .. they think they caused the issue.
  - hrktb 5y ago
    > they think they caused the issue. Which is the underlying cause of the universal “I didn’t do anything” disclaimer before they even start explaining the issue. And the aggressivity if that tension is not defused before replaying their actions to get the context. Solving issues requires way more social skills than people assume.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      there should be a "if you made a mistake, it means the company did something wrong" message on computers
      - hrktb 5y ago
        Yes, it's really a disservice to have "Please contact your administrator for assistance" messages, putting the user in a "you should get some help" position that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
- sundvor 5y ago
  I'm a near 50s guy who grew up on Vic20s and hasn't stopped since. The UX of my son's iPad is almost enough to drive me insane. So many counter intuitive ways to do things, such as completely invisible (ZERO freaking indicators) swipes needed to access extra info etc. My present favourite is how the current keypad for entering extra time on an app (yes I managed to set up parental guidelines for that POS) is cropped in half so that you have to rotate the screen in order to see the full keypad. Plenty of room on the lock screen that's displayed for this purpose, only showing the numbers keypad - they just made it so tiny you can't pick half the numbers some of which are in my parent pin. How they're selling this crap for billions of dollars is beyond me.
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    iOS discoverability/usability tanked when iOS7 came out and hasn't recovered. It went from being the only OS I'd happily give to my 80-something can-barely-email grandma, to "um... well, shit, I guess we'll get you a Chromebook... but it's gonna suck." Too many ways to accidentally make crap pop up or get stuck in weird states on iOS, now. Even the old folder behavior, that "split open" the screen to reveal the folder, made it much, much clearer to navigate for non-tech-geeks. Lots of little things like that, plus tons of gesture-initiated overlays and switching-about.
    - sundvor 5y ago
      Thanks, yes it's almost like a cult thing - you're supposed to stab and poke and just _discover_ the hidden features. One example to prove your point was that I needed to disable/restrict the fingerprint auth as he was using that to get himself more time; his old device that died didn't have one. Everything said yeah just go to "Face ID & Passcode" under settings. Except it wasn't there. An inordinate amount of effort later I learned there was a setting knee deep in Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions that would allow it to be displayed. Why TF not just display the Touch settings tab still and then a message saying its use is disabled in that part of their jungle hell? I mean that'd actually be user friendly. (Setting up Docker in WSL2 is a breeze compared to the guesswork that's becoming their new norm.)
uxcolumbo 5y ago
Is it possible to downgrade Safari to a previous working version?
- owyn 5y ago
  Nope, it's part of the OS now.
legostormtroopr 5y ago
I can't believe the recommended solution is "backup and reinstall your operating system". A browser shouldn't be so integral, that if it breaks the only option is to wipe your computer and start again.
- X-Istence 5y ago
  Is that user an Apple employee? I though the forums were a free for all?
  - tlamponi 5y ago
    I mean, independent of that, that answer is flagged as "Apple recommended"...
    - X-Istence 5y ago
      Is that because the user has a certain amount of karma? I tried to dig into it but I am not sure how it got that flag. Telling users to re-install the system seems a little drastic and seems like the last thing Apple would recommend were you take your machine to the genius bar...
      - Peritract 5y ago
        Regardless of whether the flag was applied deliberately by an employee, or by an automated process, it's still showing up as 'Apple recommended' on their official support forum: any way you slice it, Apple is recommending exactly that.
  - nielsbot 5y ago
    Apple employees are not allowed to comment on these forums.
- creshal 5y ago
  I remember when everyone laughed when Windows XP's update tool ran as ActiveX applet inside IE6. Guess Apple didn't learn anything from that.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Well, I'm running 14.1 and it seems fine. So, as usual with these hyperbolic titles, the problem is either something else, or a combination of separate issues.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  Of course it is. If it would happen 100% of the time it would've never been released. But judging from the amount of comments there and on macrumours it doesn't seem to be a too exotic cause either.
- sgloutnikov 5y ago
  ebay.com crashes like clockwork [0]. cnn.com also used to crash, but not anymore. Maybe something with the tracking updates. [0] https://streamable.com/9thaf7 https://streamable.com/9thaf7
- dan1234 5y ago
  Yeah all the sites in question seem to be working fine for me too. I was actually pleased they’ve finally implemented date/time inputs so I can stop using JS calendars now.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  The title isn't hyperbolic if the software is completely unusable for the people reporting the issue, which it is. What part of "tabs crash repeatedly and then go away, preventing you from visiting websites" sounds usable to you? How would the reporter know if the issue is specific to them or applies to everyone without posting a thread about it?
Doctor_Fegg 5y ago
I had a user report exactly this on my site this week (https://cycle.travel/map https://cycle.travel/map), but iOS 14.5 rather than MacOS. I upgraded my iPad and could reproduce it trivially. The cause was calling focus/setSelectionRange on a textfield within a click handler. When I commented these out then the problem disappeared. Not a rare combination and I’d have thought beta-testing should have flushed this out, but there you go. Edit: If you want to try reproducing this, go to https://cycle.travel/map/mobile?debug=1 https://cycle.travel/map/mobile?debug=1 , and click within the 'From' or 'To' field. It crashes every time on my iPad running iOS 14.5.
- alanfranz 5y ago
  I've got a fully-updated iPhone 11 with iOS 14.5 and your site works perfectly well with my device in Safari.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Maybe because they commented out the code on their site that triggered the issue?
    - alanfranz 5y ago
      Possibly. But then there's no way to confirm it happens on a lot of devices. So far I've been unable to reproduce the issue on any of my MacOS and iOS devices on any problem-related URL I was given in this thread or linked discussions.
      - mannerheim 5y ago
        Trello evidently had a bug (or rather, Safari 14.1 evidently has a bug which manifested on Trello) related to Intl.NumberFormat: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Re-Trello-stuck-at-loading-after-Safari-14-1-update-on-m/qaq-p/1677346/comment-id/45687#M45687 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Re-Trell... Does the following work for you in Safari 14.1? new Intl.NumberFormat('en-US', {notation: 'compact'}).format(1825602) In Chrome this gives "1.8M"
simonw 5y ago
I got the "a problem repeatedly occurred" error in Mobile Safari on iOS 14.5 just a moment ago when playing with this demo: https://replidraw.vercel.app/d/orx5hodjsll https://replidraw.vercel.app/d/orx5hodjsll
- zwaps 5y ago
  The problem with Iphone is in addition that Apple only allows their own browser to exist. I mean yes, you can get another browser, but it is just a skin of safari. You can't switch to another engine. So in this case, less than ideal.
alanfranz 5y ago
Everything works for me (Mojave with Safari 14.1). I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist and/or that it's not Apple's fault, but, possibly, it's not strictly related to Safari. DEBUGGING MINDSET: On MacOS, this Safari update was pushed along a MacOS update. (and maybe in iOS as well, along the 14.5 iOS?). How can you say the problem is within Safari? There's even a user complaining about a problem in Apple mail (a network timeout). This problem could lie anywhere in the network stack, and maybe Safari is using a specific pattern that triggers the bug very often on some specific hardware. It could be a driver issue for what we know. Now I'm trying to update my other machine (2015 Macbook Pro 15").
- sgloutnikov 5y ago
  ebay.com crashes like clockwork [0]. cnn.com also used to crash, but not anymore. Maybe something with the tracking updates. [0] https://streamable.com/9thaf7 https://streamable.com/9thaf7
  - alanfranz 5y ago
    ebay.com works 100% on my devices. I cannot trigger a single fault.
    - dcow 5y ago
      Ebay works fine for me too.
edem 5y ago
When was the last time it was usable?
okla 5y ago
What is completely broken for me since macOS 11/iOS 14 update is iCloud tabs. They simply don't sync between Mac and iPhone anymore, the list is almost always empty. Sometimes it contains some random out-of-date links, but touching any of them make them all disappear.
deergomoo 5y ago
Font smoothing is messed up too. For some utterly inexplicable reason, starting with Big Sur Apple turned on font smoothing by default, and then removed the toggle in settings to turn it off, despite the fact that it looks like complete crap. However, you can run a Terminal command to disable it again, which works great...except for the new version of Safari, where all the fonts look ridiculously bold [0] [0] https://imgur.com/a/IJBGjHu https://imgur.com/a/IJBGjHu The top comment of this thread; Safari on the left, Firefox on the right.
- baxuz 5y ago
  What do you mean by "font smoothing"? Subpixel antialiasing has been disabled and steadily pruned from the OS since Mojave if that's what you're talking about: https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/
  - deergomoo 5y ago
    I think it's separate to subpixel anti-aliasing. It's whatever was controlled by the old "Use LCD font smoothing where available" in System Preferences > General. With that toggle gone, it can still be toggled using the "AppleFontSmoothing" defaults key.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  Jeez, imgur sucks. I looked for a minute at an unrelated meme trying to figure out where in its comments your example was, and then I noticed the thin image at the top (yours). Turns out Imgur adds random stuff under your post, because now it's a social network and not an image host. Validates my decision to make my own image host.
  - deergomoo 5y ago
    Yeah, I haven't used imgur for a while and it took me a hot second to work out how to upload an image—a button labelled "new post" is completely contrary to what imgur is in my head.
willyt 5y ago
Is this really a big thing? I went expecting hundreds of angry comments but there are 11 comments in this discussion and 11 on the macrumors discussion that someone mentioned?
- RyJones 5y ago
  I have gone from zero Safari crashes anywhere to multiple times a day Safari crashes. I didn't start a thread on it; I switched to using Edge and Firefox for sites that crash Safari.
- owyn 5y ago
  Well, it sure is for me. I immediately noticed it and started ranting about it on a tech channel at work. This security update just went out a couple of days ago so it probably isn't widely distributed yet. One of my co-workers also applied the update just out of curiosity and ran into the same issue. Maybe it depends on what sites matter to you perhaps but it makes my bank web site unusable for instance.
saagarjha 5y ago
The error message that Safari is showing means that the web content process is crashing. This should leave logs in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports (easily viewable in Console, under "Crash Reports"). Without those it's unlikely that anybody will be able to provide any further information as to what is happening here.
- owyn 5y ago
  Thanks for this comment! I applied this security update yesterday and it updated Safari and I get the same reliable crashes on some web pages. The really annoying thing is after it crashes a couple of times it blanks out the whole page. Normally there's a small banner that says "this page crashed" sure, but now it is a full screen error message saying "this page crashed too many times", making the site entirely unusable. Every time it crashes in the same place and leaves this in the logs: Dyld Error Message: Symbol not found: __ZN6webrtc24setVideoDecoderCallbacksEPFPvRKNS_14SdpVideoFormatEEPFiS0_EPFiS0_jPKhmttEPFiS0_S0_E Referenced from: /System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/WebKit Expected in: /System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/../../../libwebrtc.dylib Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread 0 dyld 0x000000011767f3ba __abort_with_payload + 10 1 dyld 0x000000011767ebac abort_with_payload_wrapper_internal + 82 2 dyld 0x000000011767ebde abort_with_payload + 9 3 dyld 0x000000011763ea9d dyld::halt(char const*) + 343 4 dyld 0x000000011763ebc7 dyld::fastBindLazySymbol(ImageLoader\*, unsigned long) + 167 5 libdyld.dylib 0x00007fff60f4f32e dyld_stub_binder + 282 6 ??? 0x0000000108649008 0 + 4435775496 7 com.apple.WebKit 0x00000001083c758d WebKit::LibWebRTCProvider::createEncoderFactory() + 27 8 com.apple.WebCore 0x000000010ae7bdc9 WebCore::LibWebRTCProvider::createPeerConnectionFactory(rtc::Thread*, rtc::Thread\*) + 153 (etc)
  - kabob 5y ago
    owyn: Same here! Did some digging and noticed something that might help. Notice in the "Symbol not found" the WebKit is looking in the dylib for a big honkin' symbol with "_jPKhmttEPFiS0_" near the end. When I opened the libwebrtc.dylib file in TextEdit, I see a very similar big honkin' symbol, but it's missing "tt" near the end. So that part of the symbol reads, "_jPKhmEPFiS0_". Don't know who's to blame, the WebKit or dylib file, but these two parts of Safari appear to identify some "setVideoDecoderCallbacks" code by 2 different names, and that's causing this crash!
rcarmo 5y ago
Can’t say I’ve had any significant issues yet other than it duplicating all of my bookmarks after the upgrade for some reason.
blueflow 5y ago
Is HN the new torch and pitchfork store?
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Has it ever been anything else?
nailer 5y ago
macOS isn't a growth area for Apple. It's a legacy product, which no longer has it's own team, and macOS contributes to a tiny portion of Apple revenue. It basically only exists for software developers. Apple's advertising pushes people who were thinking about laptops to use iOS devices. Not saying macOS wasn't great. It was. But Apple aren't investing in it anymore.
- yhoiseth 5y ago
  > Mac sales went from $5.4B to a record $9.1B year-over-year. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/04/28/aapl-q2-2021-results https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/04/28/aapl-q2-2021-re...
  - nailer 5y ago
    Not sure how that responds to or invalidates anything above. If you think that increases in Mac sales mean that macOS is a growing part of Apple's revenue: it isn't: macOS is dwarfed by other products more every year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segments-revenue-of-apple/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment...
    - yhoiseth 5y ago
      I don’t have access to the statistic you are referring to, so we might be talking past each other. But, as far as I can tell, macOS is a growing part of Apple’s revenue, at least over the last year: According to https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-quarter-results/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-..., Apple “posted a March quarter record revenue of $89.6 billion, up 54 percent year over year …”. Mac, on the other hand, grew by 69 percent year over year.
      - nailer 5y ago
        Sorry about that, the site lets users in from Google for free, but puts ad walls up for direct links. Sneaky. You're speaking about raw numbers. From that report: $47.94 billion: iPhone (Up 65%) $9.1 billion: Mac (Up 70% YOY) $7.81 billion: iPad (up 79% YOY) To let us know what Apple prioritises, though, we need to look at percentages of the operating unit as a percent of Apple revenue. Mac revenue was 4.8 in 2014, 5.2% in the most recent figure I could find. https://barefigur.es/companies/apple/products/ https://barefigur.es/companies/apple/products/ We can also look at company reorgs like getting rid of the macOS team, advertisements steering customers away from macOS, and other public facts.
agys 5y ago
Slightly off topic rant: Safari’s dev tools are completely unusable too: most of the times the line number of a (JS) error is absent or wrong, especially if the error originates from an ES module (I submitted several bugs to webkit). It’s a browser I want to love – especially for its performance – but it’s becoming harder.
- pudmaidai 5y ago
  I’ll add. Fresh Big Sur install on the fastest MacBook 16” in store now: After changing the selected DOM element it takes several seconds to show its CSS on the right sidebar. It feels like every dev tool sucks for me though. Chrome regularly froze the whole tab and crashes the tools on my old computer. Firefox I don’t remember exactly but also it was a PITA
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 5y ago
    Give Firefox dev tools another chance. I use them exclusively wherever I can.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lreeves 5y ago
This happened to my dad when he upgraded the other day and I spent hours painstakingly trying to fix it and it seems like the recommended fix is reinstalling OSX. Well, he's on Firefox now but what the fuck - this basically affects all the websites he goes to. I can't believe this made it out through testing.
minikites 5y ago
Apple's premier operating system is worse than Windows 95. How the mighty have fallen.
Chirael 5y ago
This happens to me every day of the week on various sites, multiple times a day. I assumed it was because I had a large number of tabs open (anywhere from 50 to 200), but it's very frustrating. Only thing I can do is quit Safari and re-open, then it goes away for a few hours, then it'll happen again. After a few rounds of that my only choice is to restart the iPad. That buys me a few more hours, but it eventually happens again. Supremely frustrating. Started happening maybe a year ago, never once happened before that. My guess is poor quality control or testing on an update, bug or memory leak was introduced and just never fixed. Very frustrating. Apple stuff is supposed to "just work" but in this case, the browser crashes multiple times a day which is an awful user experience.
diebeforei485 5y ago
Apple should work on being able to update Safari, Podcasts, etc independently of the OS. New bugs in OS + new bugs in Safari is not a good combination.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

136 points by sgloutnikov 5y ago

Another discussion at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/safari-14-1-is-completely-unusable.2293717/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/safari-14-1-is-complete...

lnwlebjel 5y ago
... which is also unreadable with Safari!
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  No, it renders perfectly.
  - masswerk 5y ago
    Same here (Big Sur 11.3 / M1), also ebay, etc work perfectly. It seems to be a rather erratic problem. (Maybe, it's related to some framework corruption and the advice to reinstall isn't that bad, after all?)

junon 5y ago

The seniors on there that are beside themselves unable to use some of their sites is something I think of when designing software. Your users aren't always tech savvy. Sometimes quite the opposite. A single change, even if it isn't a bug, can render your program unusable by some because it's so different.

agumonkey 5y ago
At least communicate. Users aren't stupid but they approach the web with fear most of the time, so anything out of the ordinary is a sign of a problem they don't understand nor know how to restore and most of the time .. they think they caused the issue.
- hrktb 5y ago
  > they think they caused the issue. Which is the underlying cause of the universal “I didn’t do anything” disclaimer before they even start explaining the issue. And the aggressivity if that tension is not defused before replaying their actions to get the context. Solving issues requires way more social skills than people assume.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    there should be a "if you made a mistake, it means the company did something wrong" message on computers
    - hrktb 5y ago
      Yes, it's really a disservice to have "Please contact your administrator for assistance" messages, putting the user in a "you should get some help" position that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
sundvor 5y ago
I'm a near 50s guy who grew up on Vic20s and hasn't stopped since. The UX of my son's iPad is almost enough to drive me insane. So many counter intuitive ways to do things, such as completely invisible (ZERO freaking indicators) swipes needed to access extra info etc. My present favourite is how the current keypad for entering extra time on an app (yes I managed to set up parental guidelines for that POS) is cropped in half so that you have to rotate the screen in order to see the full keypad. Plenty of room on the lock screen that's displayed for this purpose, only showing the numbers keypad - they just made it so tiny you can't pick half the numbers some of which are in my parent pin. How they're selling this crap for billions of dollars is beyond me.
- intergalplan 5y ago
  iOS discoverability/usability tanked when iOS7 came out and hasn't recovered. It went from being the only OS I'd happily give to my 80-something can-barely-email grandma, to "um... well, shit, I guess we'll get you a Chromebook... but it's gonna suck." Too many ways to accidentally make crap pop up or get stuck in weird states on iOS, now. Even the old folder behavior, that "split open" the screen to reveal the folder, made it much, much clearer to navigate for non-tech-geeks. Lots of little things like that, plus tons of gesture-initiated overlays and switching-about.
  - sundvor 5y ago
    Thanks, yes it's almost like a cult thing - you're supposed to stab and poke and just _discover_ the hidden features. One example to prove your point was that I needed to disable/restrict the fingerprint auth as he was using that to get himself more time; his old device that died didn't have one. Everything said yeah just go to "Face ID & Passcode" under settings. Except it wasn't there. An inordinate amount of effort later I learned there was a setting knee deep in Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions that would allow it to be displayed. Why TF not just display the Touch settings tab still and then a message saying its use is disabled in that part of their jungle hell? I mean that'd actually be user friendly. (Setting up Docker in WSL2 is a breeze compared to the guesswork that's becoming their new norm.)

uxcolumbo 5y ago

Is it possible to downgrade Safari to a previous working version?

owyn 5y ago
Nope, it's part of the OS now.

legostormtroopr 5y ago

I can't believe the recommended solution is "backup and reinstall your operating system". A browser shouldn't be so integral, that if it breaks the only option is to wipe your computer and start again.

X-Istence 5y ago
Is that user an Apple employee? I though the forums were a free for all?
- tlamponi 5y ago
  I mean, independent of that, that answer is flagged as "Apple recommended"...
  - X-Istence 5y ago
    Is that because the user has a certain amount of karma? I tried to dig into it but I am not sure how it got that flag. Telling users to re-install the system seems a little drastic and seems like the last thing Apple would recommend were you take your machine to the genius bar...
    - Peritract 5y ago
      Regardless of whether the flag was applied deliberately by an employee, or by an automated process, it's still showing up as 'Apple recommended' on their official support forum: any way you slice it, Apple is recommending exactly that.
- nielsbot 5y ago
  Apple employees are not allowed to comment on these forums.
creshal 5y ago
I remember when everyone laughed when Windows XP's update tool ran as ActiveX applet inside IE6. Guess Apple didn't learn anything from that.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

Well, I'm running 14.1 and it seems fine. So, as usual with these hyperbolic titles, the problem is either something else, or a combination of separate issues.

iforgotpassword 5y ago
Of course it is. If it would happen 100% of the time it would've never been released. But judging from the amount of comments there and on macrumours it doesn't seem to be a too exotic cause either.
sgloutnikov 5y ago
ebay.com crashes like clockwork [0]. cnn.com also used to crash, but not anymore. Maybe something with the tracking updates. [0] https://streamable.com/9thaf7 https://streamable.com/9thaf7
dan1234 5y ago
Yeah all the sites in question seem to be working fine for me too. I was actually pleased they’ve finally implemented date/time inputs so I can stop using JS calendars now.
kevingadd 5y ago
The title isn't hyperbolic if the software is completely unusable for the people reporting the issue, which it is. What part of "tabs crash repeatedly and then go away, preventing you from visiting websites" sounds usable to you? How would the reporter know if the issue is specific to them or applies to everyone without posting a thread about it?

Doctor_Fegg 5y ago

I had a user report exactly this on my site this week (https://cycle.travel/map https://cycle.travel/map), but iOS 14.5 rather than MacOS. I upgraded my iPad and could reproduce it trivially. The cause was calling focus/setSelectionRange on a textfield within a click handler. When I commented these out then the problem disappeared. Not a rare combination and I’d have thought beta-testing should have flushed this out, but there you go. Edit: If you want to try reproducing this, go to https://cycle.travel/map/mobile?debug=1 https://cycle.travel/map/mobile?debug=1 , and click within the 'From' or 'To' field. It crashes every time on my iPad running iOS 14.5.

alanfranz 5y ago
I've got a fully-updated iPhone 11 with iOS 14.5 and your site works perfectly well with my device in Safari.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Maybe because they commented out the code on their site that triggered the issue?
  - alanfranz 5y ago
    Possibly. But then there's no way to confirm it happens on a lot of devices. So far I've been unable to reproduce the issue on any of my MacOS and iOS devices on any problem-related URL I was given in this thread or linked discussions.
    - mannerheim 5y ago
      Trello evidently had a bug (or rather, Safari 14.1 evidently has a bug which manifested on Trello) related to Intl.NumberFormat: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Re-Trello-stuck-at-loading-after-Safari-14-1-update-on-m/qaq-p/1677346/comment-id/45687#M45687 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-questions/Re-Trell... Does the following work for you in Safari 14.1? new Intl.NumberFormat('en-US', {notation: 'compact'}).format(1825602) In Chrome this gives "1.8M"

simonw 5y ago

I got the "a problem repeatedly occurred" error in Mobile Safari on iOS 14.5 just a moment ago when playing with this demo: https://replidraw.vercel.app/d/orx5hodjsll https://replidraw.vercel.app/d/orx5hodjsll

zwaps 5y ago
The problem with Iphone is in addition that Apple only allows their own browser to exist. I mean yes, you can get another browser, but it is just a skin of safari. You can't switch to another engine. So in this case, less than ideal.

alanfranz 5y ago

Everything works for me (Mojave with Safari 14.1). I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist and/or that it's not Apple's fault, but, possibly, it's not strictly related to Safari. DEBUGGING MINDSET: On MacOS, this Safari update was pushed along a MacOS update. (and maybe in iOS as well, along the 14.5 iOS?). How can you say the problem is within Safari? There's even a user complaining about a problem in Apple mail (a network timeout). This problem could lie anywhere in the network stack, and maybe Safari is using a specific pattern that triggers the bug very often on some specific hardware. It could be a driver issue for what we know. Now I'm trying to update my other machine (2015 Macbook Pro 15").

sgloutnikov 5y ago
ebay.com crashes like clockwork [0]. cnn.com also used to crash, but not anymore. Maybe something with the tracking updates. [0] https://streamable.com/9thaf7 https://streamable.com/9thaf7
- alanfranz 5y ago
  ebay.com works 100% on my devices. I cannot trigger a single fault.
  - dcow 5y ago
    Ebay works fine for me too.

edem 5y ago

When was the last time it was usable?

okla 5y ago

What is completely broken for me since macOS 11/iOS 14 update is iCloud tabs. They simply don't sync between Mac and iPhone anymore, the list is almost always empty. Sometimes it contains some random out-of-date links, but touching any of them make them all disappear.

deergomoo 5y ago

Font smoothing is messed up too. For some utterly inexplicable reason, starting with Big Sur Apple turned on font smoothing by default, and then removed the toggle in settings to turn it off, despite the fact that it looks like complete crap. However, you can run a Terminal command to disable it again, which works great...except for the new version of Safari, where all the fonts look ridiculously bold [0] [0] https://imgur.com/a/IJBGjHu https://imgur.com/a/IJBGjHu The top comment of this thread; Safari on the left, Firefox on the right.

baxuz 5y ago
What do you mean by "font smoothing"? Subpixel antialiasing has been disabled and steadily pruned from the OS since Mojave if that's what you're talking about: https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/
- deergomoo 5y ago
  I think it's separate to subpixel anti-aliasing. It's whatever was controlled by the old "Use LCD font smoothing where available" in System Preferences > General. With that toggle gone, it can still be toggled using the "AppleFontSmoothing" defaults key.
StavrosK 5y ago
Jeez, imgur sucks. I looked for a minute at an unrelated meme trying to figure out where in its comments your example was, and then I noticed the thin image at the top (yours). Turns out Imgur adds random stuff under your post, because now it's a social network and not an image host. Validates my decision to make my own image host.
- deergomoo 5y ago
  Yeah, I haven't used imgur for a while and it took me a hot second to work out how to upload an image—a button labelled "new post" is completely contrary to what imgur is in my head.

willyt 5y ago

Is this really a big thing? I went expecting hundreds of angry comments but there are 11 comments in this discussion and 11 on the macrumors discussion that someone mentioned?

RyJones 5y ago
I have gone from zero Safari crashes anywhere to multiple times a day Safari crashes. I didn't start a thread on it; I switched to using Edge and Firefox for sites that crash Safari.
owyn 5y ago
Well, it sure is for me. I immediately noticed it and started ranting about it on a tech channel at work. This security update just went out a couple of days ago so it probably isn't widely distributed yet. One of my co-workers also applied the update just out of curiosity and ran into the same issue. Maybe it depends on what sites matter to you perhaps but it makes my bank web site unusable for instance.

saagarjha 5y ago

The error message that Safari is showing means that the web content process is crashing. This should leave logs in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports (easily viewable in Console, under "Crash Reports"). Without those it's unlikely that anybody will be able to provide any further information as to what is happening here.

owyn 5y ago
Thanks for this comment! I applied this security update yesterday and it updated Safari and I get the same reliable crashes on some web pages. The really annoying thing is after it crashes a couple of times it blanks out the whole page. Normally there's a small banner that says "this page crashed" sure, but now it is a full screen error message saying "this page crashed too many times", making the site entirely unusable. Every time it crashes in the same place and leaves this in the logs: Dyld Error Message: Symbol not found: __ZN6webrtc24setVideoDecoderCallbacksEPFPvRKNS_14SdpVideoFormatEEPFiS0_EPFiS0_jPKhmttEPFiS0_S0_E Referenced from: /System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/WebKit Expected in: /System/Library/StagedFrameworks/Safari/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/../../../libwebrtc.dylib Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread 0 dyld 0x000000011767f3ba __abort_with_payload + 10 1 dyld 0x000000011767ebac abort_with_payload_wrapper_internal + 82 2 dyld 0x000000011767ebde abort_with_payload + 9 3 dyld 0x000000011763ea9d dyld::halt(char const*) + 343 4 dyld 0x000000011763ebc7 dyld::fastBindLazySymbol(ImageLoader\*, unsigned long) + 167 5 libdyld.dylib 0x00007fff60f4f32e dyld_stub_binder + 282 6 ??? 0x0000000108649008 0 + 4435775496 7 com.apple.WebKit 0x00000001083c758d WebKit::LibWebRTCProvider::createEncoderFactory() + 27 8 com.apple.WebCore 0x000000010ae7bdc9 WebCore::LibWebRTCProvider::createPeerConnectionFactory(rtc::Thread*, rtc::Thread\*) + 153 (etc)
- kabob 5y ago
  owyn: Same here! Did some digging and noticed something that might help. Notice in the "Symbol not found" the WebKit is looking in the dylib for a big honkin' symbol with "_jPKhmttEPFiS0_" near the end. When I opened the libwebrtc.dylib file in TextEdit, I see a very similar big honkin' symbol, but it's missing "tt" near the end. So that part of the symbol reads, "_jPKhmEPFiS0_". Don't know who's to blame, the WebKit or dylib file, but these two parts of Safari appear to identify some "setVideoDecoderCallbacks" code by 2 different names, and that's causing this crash!

rcarmo 5y ago

Can’t say I’ve had any significant issues yet other than it duplicating all of my bookmarks after the upgrade for some reason.

blueflow 5y ago

Is HN the new torch and pitchfork store?

user-the-name 5y ago
Has it ever been anything else?

nailer 5y ago

macOS isn't a growth area for Apple. It's a legacy product, which no longer has it's own team, and macOS contributes to a tiny portion of Apple revenue. It basically only exists for software developers. Apple's advertising pushes people who were thinking about laptops to use iOS devices. Not saying macOS wasn't great. It was. But Apple aren't investing in it anymore.

yhoiseth 5y ago
> Mac sales went from $5.4B to a record $9.1B year-over-year. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/04/28/aapl-q2-2021-results https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/04/28/aapl-q2-2021-re...
- nailer 5y ago
  Not sure how that responds to or invalidates anything above. If you think that increases in Mac sales mean that macOS is a growing part of Apple's revenue: it isn't: macOS is dwarfed by other products more every year. https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segments-revenue-of-apple/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment...
  - yhoiseth 5y ago
    I don’t have access to the statistic you are referring to, so we might be talking past each other. But, as far as I can tell, macOS is a growing part of Apple’s revenue, at least over the last year: According to https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-quarter-results/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-..., Apple “posted a March quarter record revenue of $89.6 billion, up 54 percent year over year …”. Mac, on the other hand, grew by 69 percent year over year.
    - nailer 5y ago
      Sorry about that, the site lets users in from Google for free, but puts ad walls up for direct links. Sneaky. You're speaking about raw numbers. From that report: $47.94 billion: iPhone (Up 65%) $9.1 billion: Mac (Up 70% YOY) $7.81 billion: iPad (up 79% YOY) To let us know what Apple prioritises, though, we need to look at percentages of the operating unit as a percent of Apple revenue. Mac revenue was 4.8 in 2014, 5.2% in the most recent figure I could find. https://barefigur.es/companies/apple/products/ https://barefigur.es/companies/apple/products/ We can also look at company reorgs like getting rid of the macOS team, advertisements steering customers away from macOS, and other public facts.

agys 5y ago

Slightly off topic rant: Safari’s dev tools are completely unusable too: most of the times the line number of a (JS) error is absent or wrong, especially if the error originates from an ES module (I submitted several bugs to webkit). It’s a browser I want to love – especially for its performance – but it’s becoming harder.

pudmaidai 5y ago
I’ll add. Fresh Big Sur install on the fastest MacBook 16” in store now: After changing the selected DOM element it takes several seconds to show its CSS on the right sidebar. It feels like every dev tool sucks for me though. Chrome regularly froze the whole tab and crashes the tools on my old computer. Firefox I don’t remember exactly but also it was a PITA
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 5y ago
  Give Firefox dev tools another chance. I use them exclusively wherever I can.

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lreeves 5y ago

This happened to my dad when he upgraded the other day and I spent hours painstakingly trying to fix it and it seems like the recommended fix is reinstalling OSX. Well, he's on Firefox now but what the fuck - this basically affects all the websites he goes to. I can't believe this made it out through testing.

minikites 5y ago

Apple's premier operating system is worse than Windows 95. How the mighty have fallen.

Chirael 5y ago

This happens to me every day of the week on various sites, multiple times a day. I assumed it was because I had a large number of tabs open (anywhere from 50 to 200), but it's very frustrating. Only thing I can do is quit Safari and re-open, then it goes away for a few hours, then it'll happen again. After a few rounds of that my only choice is to restart the iPad. That buys me a few more hours, but it eventually happens again. Supremely frustrating. Started happening maybe a year ago, never once happened before that. My guess is poor quality control or testing on an update, bug or memory leak was introduced and just never fixed. Very frustrating. Apple stuff is supposed to "just work" but in this case, the browser crashes multiple times a day which is an awful user experience.

diebeforei485 5y ago

Apple should work on being able to update Safari, Podcasts, etc independently of the OS. New bugs in OS + new bugs in Safari is not a good combination.

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