
Apple Safari users suffer crashes - SlashmanX
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35420573
======
autoreleasepool
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.

~~~
vlunkr
This is me exactly. I can't stand the UI in FF. It seems to change too much
and it's ugly. There are probably plugins to help with that, but I haven't
invested the time to look into it. It's also hard to kick the Chrome dev
tools.

~~~
sawwit
How is FF ugly? I don't find the UI very different from Chrome and Safari.

~~~
cptskippy
I don't get how he thinks it's ugly or different.

Not only is it very similar but, unlike Chrome or Safari, every aspect of it
is customizable so you can make it look however you want. Out of the box you
can rearrange the the UI elements to match Chrome or Safari.

~~~
swozey
I absolutely hate the FF UI. I WANT to use FF, I actually switched a few
months ago and did it for a couple of months. I THINK my problem (I say think
because I feel like someone will measure the pixel and say I'm wrong) is that
it feels like there is a ton of wasted space between the tabs, above the tabs.
etc. I can't control the size of the top bars and they're huge compared to
chrome. I'm a fan of tiny icons and very, very compact UIs so that I can get
more on the screen at once. Here's my comparison on a 28" monitor
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/k32gln7s3ev5a7t/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/k32gln7s3ev5a7t/Screenshot%202016-01-27%2010.51.41.png?dl=0)

~~~
cpeterso
You might try the "Custom Tab Width" add-on to shrink your Firefox tabs. I
also like to set my toolbar bookmarks' names to an empty string, so my toolbar
is just a bunch of bookmark favicons.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-tab-
wi...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-tab-width/)

------
untog
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-t...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/22/10813862/Safari-sucks-at-twitter)

~~~
k-mcgrady
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
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
> _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
If only it were open source, then we could check.

~~~
coldtea
If only it were open source and its users had both the knowledge required, the
time AND cared enough to check.

------
grabcocque
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
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).

~~~
fulafel
Yep. Hence it's barking the wrong tree to frame this as primarily Safari's
fault.

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SlashmanX
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_crashi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/42wle1/safari_crashing_after_ios_921_update/)

------
xiaq
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.

------
rplnt
Opera trying to capitalize
[https://twitter.com/coastbrowser/status/692367086631391232](https://twitter.com/coastbrowser/status/692367086631391232)

------
joesmo
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.

------
amelius
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
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.

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

~~~
yoz-y
Works for me as well. Are you by any chance using duck duck go as your default
search provider?

~~~
Sheepsteak
Works fine for me too and I'm using DuckDuckGo on both iOS and Mac.

~~~
kiwijamo
I use DuckDuckGo as well and I was affected by this.

------
sprite
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.

------
sleepyhead
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.

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

------
Razengan
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..

------
mbillie1
Safari needs to start respecting HTML5 input validations.

~~~
coldtea
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.

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adajos
This is pretty sad Apple.

