Search Suggestions Causing Apple's Safari Browser To Crash on Many Devices (theverge.com) 83
An anonymous reader writes: According to the Verge (and my wife) Apple Safari browsers are crashing left, right, and center due to Safari's search suggestions feature. "Simply disabling this feature will stop Safari crashing, or using the private mode option in the browser as a temporary workaround. Not everyone is affected, and this could be because some have the search suggestions cached locally or they're still able to reach Apple's servers thanks to a DNS cache."
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But firefox autocompletion is pretty good, unlike the garbage that is chrome which is made to report as much personal data as possible while being slow as shit at local history autocomplete.
autocompetition (Score:2)
Apple (Score:1)
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"The original iPhone was so locked to at&t you weren't even allowed to use a different, non-iPhone, at&t SIM card with it."
No so. The original iPhone required AT & T as a carrier because it was world standard, GSM only, and AT & T was at the time the only GSM carrier in the US. When T-Mobile came along, it too supported iPhone.
Later models added support for the old-timey CDMA cellular scheme, so that the other established carriers like Verizon and Sprint, with fully built-out service network
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All smartphones are locked to a carrier during the contract period, if the contract includes a subsidy. Now that this arrangement is becoming unpopular, new iPhones are being sold without a contact. Pay upfront, but no locking.
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FaceTime only works on Wifi? Guess someone forgot to tell my phone.
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I am by no means an apple fan boy, but I think the most important aspect of what Apple did was to disconnect the cell phone from the carrier. It was their way or the highway.
Umm what? You've always been able to get sim free/network free phones direct from the manufacturer or stores, Apple just charge more.
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The company survives today because of the Apple II which actually promoted the hacker ethos. After they killed it their other products and Steve Jobs took them towards bankruptcy . After his quite dramatic return , Jobs ( read Apple engineers) gave the hungry audience an incomplete but good looking and well performing computer and saved the day.
Idiot.
Jobs didn't take Apple towards bankruptcy. That would be John Sculley.
Jobs RESCUED them from the brink of bankruptcy.
Get your history right, idiot.
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Get your history right, idiot.
End-to-End control ?
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Get your history right, idiot.
End-to-End control ?
WTF does that even mean?
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Like it or not, it's true. But that's because most people always leave out the last part of that quote.
Apple, it just works. Until it doesn't.
Re:Apple (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, no kidding. If this happens 99 more times then I might as well be using Windows!
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Cook needs to let the past go and do what he knows big Steve would have done.
Deny the parentage of his daughter? Park in handicapped spaces? Screw Wozniak over?
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No, take the license plates off of all the security vehicles. It's the only way to be sure that they aren't recognizable for the next step in the plan.
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Perhaps the problem is one of people making rude suggestions to siri. Just because she's imaginary doesn't mean that she doesn't have feelings.
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Apple: It Just Borks.
Not here (Score:3)
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Thank you for that. Your hugely statistically significant data point will add so much to the discussion.
Touchy this morning? I've been testing it out, now that I'm in Safari at home, and it still isn't crashing.
And perhaps people's browsers that are not crashing might offer some insight into those that are. Just sayin'.
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Thank you for that. Your hugely statistically significant data point will add so much to the discussion.
Hey, that's like all the snarky "Works for me" "help" on Linux forums.
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Firefox user here. Never had problems with Safari crashing either. Neither has my mom, dog nor my desk lamp (neither of which uses Safari...or computers for that matter).
I think this is just a small issue that affects a minority of users that is being blown way out of proportion by Apple haters.
Exactly.
this is why (Score:3)
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Apparently you do, since that is what Chrome and Firefox do (Sqlite 3).
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Some people seem to experience a great feeling of disharmony when data is not stored in a relational database. Never made much sense to me, but what the hell. Maybe they know something we don't.
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Well, you could implement a different form of data storage in each of your applications, reinventing the wheel each time and potentially opening yourself up to new bugs each time, and you could fix those bugs in different ways each time. That kind of insanity is fun in a large organization with lots of devs and apps.
Or, you could bake a common data storage mechanism into the operating system as an API, name it maybe something like "CoreData," and then have all your devs use the same API to manage data in t
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There's surely zero chance of my changing your mind, but you might do that yourself eventually. I submit that The_Simplest_Tool_That_Will_Do_The_Job on average produces better results than One_Size_Fits_All. Think about it from time to time when you're stuck in an airport waiting for a flight that never left Albuquerque or in a traffic jam waiting for tow-trucks to clear the 97 car pileup in front of you on the motorway and have nothing better to do.
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I was with you right up until the moment you mentioned CoreData. CoreData is shit, and even Apple don't tend to use it for their apps. And it's non-portable. A very bad thing for data.
But for sure using some variety of SQL for record based data makes a lot of sense.
(Of course Core data is hackable on other platforms, as it has SQL (or XML) underlying it. But that doesn't make it a good choice over using SQL directly.)
Good old BBC (Score:1, Offtopic)
Nice to know they always have the most techno literate reporters on speed dial when they need insightful comment on a technology issues like this one with Safari:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech... [bbc.co.uk]
"This would suggest that the problem is caused by a process happening at Apple's data centres rather than a coding error in Safari itself."
Yes, thats right, the apple data centres are sending special CRASH codes to the browsers, its nothing to do with their being a bug in the browser software, no no no. Fecking idio
Re:Good old BBC (Score:4, Informative)
Please explain why yeseterday it worked, today it doesn't.
On 1/4 of 400 iPads. On every level of iOS from 7 to 9. On iPads updated either today or last month, rebuilt today or last month, restored today or last month, no matter how old the backup restored from. Simultaneously. Suddenly. Today. And only on search suggestions.
Because, as a programmer, the only thing I can think of is that they are sending some unexpected junk in the search suggestion reply from the Apple server that isn't handled properly by the browser causing a crash.
Literally, this morning, a load of our pupil's iPads all started crashing on Safari search suggestions no matter how old, how long ago they updated, what iOS level, what apps were installed, or anything else. But they were all working yesterday. And 3/4 of them still work today.
It's currently suspected that some Apple server from some kind of round-robin response system has flaked out and produced bad responses that are being cached by those iPads. Restore from known-good-working-backup does not fix the problem and the first search suggestion can crash them again.
So stop being a smart-arse and research the problem first.
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"So stop being a smart-arse and research the problem first."
Not handling a response properly and crashing is a coding bug you clueless fuckwit.
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And a shit response from the home server is still the primary problem, since if the proper response is sent the application doesn't crash with an unhandled exception.
Both pieces of software MAY have bugs, but the application being sent shit data before crashing means that the primary problem is on the side sending the shit data. The fact that the client application then crashes exposes a SECONDARY issue, while simultaneously exposing the primary issue, I.E. the shit responses being sent to the client.
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So if the browser didn't crash, but just produced an error that satisfied your pedantry, there's no problem with that? Because the server sent data?
And the browser doesn't necessarily crash. It's an unhandled exception, there's nothing to suggest it's exploitable or dangerous, it's just unexpected. The correct response is to fatal error and then get out of there. There's nothing you can really do. I suppose you could just throw away the error and carry on regardless, but that's hardly the point - and a
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If you're a teacher it explains why UK education is in such a poor state. Get a bloody clue and don't ever teach IT classes.
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Yes! The bad response and garbage data from the search server is the PRIMARY issue here that uncovered a SECONDARY bug in the application.
It's simple fucking logic: Bad response from server triggers bug in the software, therefore the primary problem that is at hand is the servers barfing and sending bad data.
The secondary issue discovered is that the application crashes with an unhandled exception when sent bad data. It HAS to be a secondary problem since the program won't crash without being sent bad data,
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No idea. I'm using Safari here but I'm still on dial-up so maybe that's why I haven't had that probl{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
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I can tell you that this bug hit my wife's phone yesterday. I turned Search Suggestions off and now everything's fine. I can tell you I've witnessed it, but I have no idea how widespread it is. I am going to turn off that feature on my phone for now.
Re:Not here (Score:4, Informative)
400+ iPads here, a school.
At least 100 affected. As soon as the keyboard should pop up to let you type in the search/address bar, it closes Safari. Doesn't matter what you do or what version of iOS you are on (which suggests the server is sending some junk instead of what it's supposed to send, but still bad programming).
The only fix is to disable search suggestions.
In fact, I linked all staff and pupils to the BBC News article this morning because it solved the problem we've been having with that all day.
Search suggestions is it Google (Score:1)
I use DuckDuckDo and haven't experienced this on iOS or OSX! Is the issue Google sabotaging this browser?
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"My Android and Windows devices don't have this problem."
Under Windows, crashing is built into the operating system.
The other Safari problem (Score:2)
I have never had Safari crash on me, but I've always been irked by the lack of ability to suppress autoplaying videos. Apple will not give us a Preferences checkbox for doing that, and it it won't support plugins that keep autoplaying videos from starting unless you specifically click on them. I'm assuming that the advertisers are insisting on this as a condition for deigning to give Apple TV some content. In Safari you can prevent all videos from playing by unchecking JavaScript and WebGL, but then you can
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A lot of people seem to find Chrome better than Safari. But for me, I don't get any further than seeing it's UI and thinking no thanks. It looks like a Windows app.