Major Problems With Safari

kuwan writes "There have been many problems reported with Safari on Apple's discussion boards. The two most prominent are that option-clicking on a link to download can replace your Home folder with the downloaded file, effectively nuking your Home folder. The other has been reported as a printing problem, but is far worse. The printing problem occurs because Safari deletes /tmp, which is a link to /private/tmp."

Comments

It's BETA software...

[xyrw]

Use at your own risk...

Granted, I was using Moz while it was in Beta, but there had been testimonials... and if you're an early adopter you ought to have good backups anyway.

Just my 2 cents...

Re:It's BETA software...

[neuroticia]

In addition, most Mac users are still accustomed to a lower-power OS, where not much damage could be done by too many things. OS X is a new breed, and old work/play habits are still being used.

Not to insult the people new to the Mac, who have come over because of OS X, or those who *DO* understand the meaning of 'beta', but most Mac and Windows users think of "Beta" as pre-release, as in "It might crash before you can save your file". They don't realize that the potential exists to cause extremely wide-spread damage and data loss.

A company with the userbase that Apple or Microsoft have, should spend a LOT more time educating their userbase as to what "Beta" means before making it as easy to download as it is. If the casual user (I'm thinking about some of my non-computer-inclined friends, some co-workers, my mother.. You know. Average.) were to see "Beta", either they a.) know what the word means in this context due to extensive exposure to long lectures on the topic courtesy of the resident geek, b.) know that in green it's the second letter of the alphabet, and assume "Beta" means "Second release", or "Version 2" or c.) Looks up "Beta" in the dictionary and sees that it's the second letter in the alphabet, is totally confused as to what the heck it means, and downloads it because Apple says it's cool, fabulous, and faster than anything out there.

Those users are also those that are most likely to be screwed by a major software bug. They don't know what "backup" means, they don't know how to "backup", even if they do know what it means, and they think computers are rock-solid stable things that will never lose anything of theirs.

If these people make up even 10 percent of your total market, you have a MAJOR obligation to inform them of what "Beta" means, and make sure they actually understand that it can result in extensive damage. Apple doesn't. It's three clicks from the main page until it's downloaded, and no place does it say in big red letters "CAUTION".

It should.

-Sara

What do you expect. . . .

[DansnBear]

Dont get me wrong, Im as big of an apple person as they come (I refuse to use a windows machine) but as the page stated (and jobs in his keynote) many times: It's Beta. . . use at your own risk. . . Im sure once it goes to a full release it will be the most kickass browser around, but untill then, I keep my copy of opera in the dock, right next to safari.

Re:Stop the presses!!!

[Zxeses]

Good point, why are we reading a news report about beta software bugs?

Specific and useful would be good here

[nrich123]

Instead of useless scaremongering.

I have done multiple control click downloads, and printed a gazillion pages with Safari b48- with no problems.

So can you please tell us *exactly how to reproduce these bugs so we can avoid it, or stop yelling fire in a crowded theatee?

Thanks.

Of course, I wouldn't have installed beta software on an unbacked up production machine mysefl, but there we go.
I don't have a production machine with less than daily backups.

Re:Specific and useful would be good here

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Those who have discovered the bug experience the following: (1) option-clicking a link deletes ~/.

For the record, there are very few reported instances of this happening, and none of them is crystal-clear. On Apple's support boards, I think I counted three people who said that this happened to them, but none of them have thus far been able to describe what they were doing when it happened. (Their accounts sound something like Ellen's "switch" commercial, if you can believe that.)

For kicks, after I heard about this I DVD'd my entire Users folder and went about option-clicking everything in sight. I ended up with a bunch of files on my desktop, but I didn't have any problems even remotely like what has been reported.

Should you be cautious? Hell, yeah. It's beta, for Chrissakes. If it sneaks out of your office in the middle of the night, rearranges your sock drawer, eats your children, and deletes all those unwatched episodes of "Wild On" off your TiVo, it's nobody's fault but your own. But is it a disaster just waiting to happen? Apparently not.

Hmm

[KH]

I am a bit skeptical about the reports. It sounds like some people are freaking out because something they didn't happened. Is it not possible that someone tried to download a file whose name was exactly the same as his home directory, and he has set his download location to /Users for whatever reason I don't understand?

Also, the reports say that /tmp was missing, not that Safari replaces /tmp with a link to /private/tmp. /tmp has always been a link to /private/tmp.

Safari is a beta software anyway. Use it at your own risk.

Rushed job?

[batobin]

A friend who is considering updating to Jaguar asked me if I liked Safari. I had to think for a second. I've switched between iCab, Netscape 6, Mozilla, IE, OmniWeb, and Chimera since I started using OS X. I had finally settled on Chimera as my primary browser before Safari got released.

So what did I respond? I told him that it seemed to me like it was a rush job. I didn't really see any signs that Apple had spent much time or effort developing the software. Yes, I fully realize it's beta. It should have bugs. But bugs as big as are mentioned in this story? Good gracious no. I've been beta testing Apple software for a long time, and bugs this big are usually taken care of with internal builds. Even seeds delivered to ADC members shouldn't have bugs this big. Safari is a widely publicized public beta.

Does anybody see any features that really show work? I know they did a lot of under-the-hood stuff, but what did they start with? What was the state of KHTML before Apple started contributing? I'm sure Apple is going to make the browser a large priority, but how much did they really put into Safari before it was released?

I call bullshit

[ealar dlanvuli]

None of those posts claiming their home directory was deleted contained any of the following information:

1: The file being downloaded
2: The download destination
3: Their Username
4: The settings they had in Safari.
5: How to attempt to repeat it.

Sounds like a nice distributed troll with a goal of ruining Safari's reputation. If anyone can provide those 5 peices of information to me, I will start to believe this might possibly be a legitimate rumor.

Re:I hope you're putting us on....

[King Babar]

One of the hallmarks of good UI design is to maximize the amount of free desktop real estate, which is one reason why tabs are so popular.

If screen real estate was the hallmark of UI, we'd still be using CLIs. Look at an app that follows those rules: vi. You have *no* clue what's going on, but you've sure got lots of real estate!

Screen real estate is a red herring here. Ease of navigation is way more important in this case. I can more easily navigate to what I can see (read tabs here) than what I have to move stuff around to see (even tabbing throught windows). Most GUI navigational aids take up screen real estate, of course, so the two ideas are not completely independent in practice.

I am not sure what point you are getting at with th CLI slam. In the days before windowed interfaces, a CLI was in one sense the ultimate screen hog, since it took up the whole screen. Now I guess you could say that vi saved screen real estate because no space was given over to navigational aids or useful status indicators. The other problem with vi is that it forced modes on you for things where modes did not necessarily make sense, and gave you no visual feedback about what was going on. The power of vi, of course, was the ability to use the power of the command line, and the power of regexes.