Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
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.
-= Who are The Headlocks? =-
We just discovered that a discussion board about a beta software program includes complaints about bugs! Shut down the press, we need to get this hot news item into today's edition. Nothing like this has ever happened before!!!!
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.
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?
/tmp was missing, not that Safari replaces /tmp with a link to /private/tmp. /tmp has always been a link to /private/tmp.
Also, the reports say that
Safari is a beta software anyway. Use it at your own risk.
> isn't /tmp a link to /private/tmp anyway
/tmp, which is a link to /private/tmp." The problem IS that the link is deleted. Not hard to fix (if you know how to use the CLI), but annoying.
Exactly, that is what it says above; "Safari deletes
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.
/tmp could not be created.
So that explains it. Apple's X11 application was crashing on me shortly after launch and immediately when requesting the creation of an xterm. The logfile said a lock file in
The following was deleted from my original post. Here's how to fix the problems with /tmp:
You need to recreate the /tmp symbolic link (/tmp is just a link to /private/tmp).
I agree with those that have said that you should use caution with beta software, but considering that over 300,000 people downloaded it on the first day there are going to be a lot of people that are going to be needing a fix. 5 of the 6 people I work with (including me) that used Safari had /tmp deleted. That's 83% which means there's probably more than 250,000 people (from just the first day) that are going to need a fix.
Other problems that might be experienced include:
There are many more problems that may come up, so anything we can do to get the word out is a good thing.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
This is a rather old debate...please see link for related debate.
KDE Office Beta
Above is an old thread regarding KDE office beta and the confusion caused by alpha, beta, etc. and different people's expectations.
I think that a good general rule of thumb is to say that:
pre-alpha/alpha software all bets are off.
Beta - We've worked out all the major computer destroying bugs but there's still lots of little annoying ones.
Pre-Release candidate - Hey, we got this thing to work pretty well and now we need people to try and break it so that when we actually release we can
Honestly, I'd be pretty pissed if someone released a beta and it did something nasty like erase my ~ directory. We're not talking about CS 101 students releasing the Hello World Browser.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
For Mac faithful, try Chimera Navigator which is astonsihly based on Gecko yet worlds apart from Netscape. It's a nice example of a rapid development project benefitting from the OS X environment. 0.6 is a major advance.
I use Opera and like it, but you do have to pay $40 for it, and we have three machines. I'm a little worrid about Opera's apparent feature creep.
I don't know what Chimera's future is, but it's free and GPL. I wish Safari all the best but will wait a little. And WHY with Aqua have they still not dropped that awful brushed metal look??? Chimera does a better job of Aqua than Apple's own product.
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 had a very similar experience with my Pismo PowerBook & Jaguar. No CD , wouldn't boot. Apple store said it is completely stuffed - they didn't even know about the firewire disk mode or single user mode.
I got as far as single user boot - but no gui and no way out.
I did what you did and I now have a functional powerbook again - but the dvd/cd was fscked so I now have an ill fitting cdrom in the slot.
I have not loaded the dev tools or X11 this time (these older 5gig drives are just too small) and I have no problems. I have nothing to indicate that fink/X11 had anything to do with my problem - it's just that they are the only things different this time around.
[xxx@xxx:~]% ls -l
lrwxrwxr-t 1 root admin 12 Jan 10 00:43 tmp@ ->
If you are a member of admin group, you can delete it.
I am beginning to get an impression that people who had set Download folder to Macintosh HD:tmp in OS 9 using Internet Config may be affected. Looks like Safari honors the setting from the Internet Config.
Posting from Safari
Actually I'm a little perplexed about the home directory thing and would like to see more details on what is going on. /Users on both of my machines is writable by root and the wheel group, but not the admin group. It doesn't seem like this could happen without write permission to /Users, so it sounds a bit fishy. However, if the user were in the wheel group, that could explain it.
The /tmp thing is easily accomplished if the user is in the admin group since most Apple software updates like to chmod g+w / even when I don't want it that way.
Personally, I run everything as a non-admin user and have a special "admin" account which is the only one in the admin group. I've ranted on this before, but I still think Apple would have been better off telling people, when they first configure the machine, to simply enter a special administrative password, separate from their normal password. Behind the scenes, they would create an admin user, but any non-advanced user would need not even know that administrative privileges are given via a separate account. All they need to know is their regular account (non-admin) password and the admin password. The facilities for this setup are mostly there - many system-type actions (system-wide prefs, software installs) already ask for an administrative user/password. Just dump the user part (defaulting to "admin"), so as not to confuse non-advanced users. Then add stuff in places like the Finder - try to copy a new program to /Applications and get a dialog asking for the password. Make it as seamless as possible.
I really think this sort of scheme would have been better, more in line with the traditional Unix security model while still giving people full control over their machines without absolutely requiring knowledge of "root," "sudo" and other Unixisms. Advanced (or wreckless) users could even be given the option to "give my account full time administrative privileges" (add to the admin group) with proper warnings of possible doom.
Say hello to zMac.
I am beginning to wonder if open betas are really the right way for software development to be moving. Recently someone mentioned how easy it is to get beta software these days, and I realized that they were right, it wasn't long ago that beta software was something you had to apply for and hope to be chosen to recieve. I think that this uniqueness prevented less knowledgable users from gaining access to the software, at least without some effort, which meant that if you got it you generally knew what it could do, and were prepared to deal with the consiquences. Perhaps more software should go back to a more closed beta to prevent these sorts of situations from occuring.
Incidentally, did you know that SPAM is concidered a treat in Hawaii? They have some resturants that feature it in $20 a plate dishes, and it usually sells out on paydays. I have heard that it was popular at truck stops as well.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Seriously though, did anyone check to make sure they got the right file from the site rather than a hacked version that was put in place of the original.
How? They didn't sign it. It's not open source, and if it were, you'd have to sift through the source for hours to have a hope of finding anything.
You would think that these kinds of bugs are serious enough that they wouldn't even put out the program (even in beta) until they were fixed.
Yeah. I would guess what happened is that Steve said to be ready by the expo, and they weren't, and they didn't have time to test extensively for major bugs like that. In any case, it's Chimera for me until the next beta.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
If you are a member of admin group, you can delete it.
Someone needs to brush up on their UNIX. to delete /tmp, you need write permission to /, not to /tmp.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
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.
I live in a giant bucket.
I likespam. Always have. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam right now!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Thank goodness, according to the latest reports it only affects Microsoft astroturfers.
-- thinkyhead software and media
i run 10.2.3, and have two main users, an admin and a normal user. i always log in a the unprivileged normal user and only use the admin for, uh, admin. duh. when files are downloaded, they go to ~/Desktop. i won't reveal my usernames for security reasons but they don't contain spaces. my admin user lives on the same disk as os x (/users/admin/), and my normal user lives on an external firewire disk (/volumes/disk/foouser/) i download flat files from my bank to import into quicken. on every other browser i've used, clicking the appropriate link on the bank's page downloads a file "foo.qif". safari comes out, i get it and use the default settings. i try downloading the file. safari shows me the contents of the flat file in the window. i go back to the previous page, option click on the link and choose "save link target as..." (i don't have the exact text, because safari is banned for reasons that will become obvious). the file downloads, i import it. fine. good. i keep using my computer for a few days, using safari (but not option-click downloading anything). i read here about how this problem has happened. i logout from my normal user, log in as my admin user and delete /Applications/Safari.app, ~/Library/Safari/*, and everything else i can find with that name. (yes, i know i can do that from terminal, but i had other stuff to do in the gui.)
when i try to log back in as my normal user, i get the default desktop and dock. yikes! sure enough, my home dir /volumes/disk/user is empty except for . and ..
after a few minutes of panic & regret & resolutions to get a friggin cd burner for backups of those priceless photos of my kid, etc, i realize the disk usage hasn't changed. relief sets in and i realize the files aren't gone, they've just been misplaced. i log out and then log in as my admin user. i run disk utility and repair the external disk. it says the directory listing is incorrect and repairs it and then everything is magically good as new. i log in as my normal user and all my files are back.
i never had any printing problems.
These are other bugs I have seen. It will be interesting to see if anyone else has experienced them.
1. Safari can handle only three downloads at a time. If you put a fourth download in the queue, it will replace the third, which will be completely skipped; the fifth will replace the fourth; and so on.
2. (Cosmetic) The "no man's land" in the lower right hand corner between the scroll bars can get screwed up if you start scrolling before Safari's finished rendering the page. Occurs especially when the horizontal scroll bar is in use.
3. (Cosmetic) Safari attempts to win time by rendering each frame in a frame URL as it is received, but before the entire frame set is known. As a result, rendering can look clumsy, with frames jumping across the window and back again.
4. You can't turn off auto-complete. To not get an entire URL as Safari presumes it, you have to delete the completion twice.
5. You cannot stop animations, and you cannot set animations to loop only a single time.
6. The History menu becomes impossible to use with too many URLs - it locks up as Safari attempts to load the "Earlier Today" submenu. Workaround is to hit the up arrow key when the menu is highlighted on the menu bar.
None of these are serious, except perhaps the download queue bug, and that's a good one.
Cheers, R.
Anyway (rolls eyes), go to Apple Discussion Boards and search for Galen Muir (the one who gave me the solution). Look for a post (or posts) with subject "RE: Possible Solution"
This fix should resolve any issues you may have with Classic, Software Update, Installer (and maybe printing, CD burning, and "incorrect PPP option" while trying to connect to the internet).
If you have downloaded Safari, and suffered thse problems, then i highly suggest that you check those posts and carefully follow the directions.
Yeah, I need a brush up...
/tmp. Yes, I tried rm /tmp :) I am in the admin group.
But / was also group writable, too. I was able to delete
I find UFS slower.
I'm not going to use a filesystem unless, at the very least, it supports FileIDs.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
no problem at all on my iBook 500 with 384 MB of RAM, 10.2.3.
Tabs are a killer feature for me. Once I started using tabs in Galeon, all other browsers suddenly seemed awkward and frustrating to use over a long period of time. Right now I have 7 tabs open in Galeon, and I can easily read enough of the titles to know what page is what.
Many of the tabs have become a semi-permanent fixture in my browser, in that I use them for quick access to site multiple times a day. Some of the pages the tabs point at auto-refresh, so all I have to do is hit the tab to get a quick update for that set of information.
Another great way to use tabs is to index a string of links as you pursue it. It's like sticking your fingers in a choose-your-own-adventure book at each junction, for those who can remember ever doing that. Tabs make this very easy to do, much easier than bookmarks.
Tabs manage pop-ups more elegantly than full-pages. The pop ups do not obscure the previous pages, so you can read them only when you are ready.
One feature galeon has that complements tab-browsing is that it remembering your tabs and across sessions, so even if you have to reboot or accidently kill the webbrowser you can instantly get back a rich session that might otherwise take 10 minutes to set up.
I like Chimera a lot, but I still prefer galeon because Galeon puts close "X" buttons on each tab. If Chimera did that it would be perfect for me.
I can't even contemplate a tabless browser for anything more than rudimentary local HTML file viewing. People multitask, and tabs help you do this without wasting screen space or cluttering the task bar, which has enough applications to deal with as it is.
But beta software is deliberately released to customers for testing. This is for the benefit of the company, not the customers. Companies should go out of their way to make sure their beta software doesn't do anything seriously bad, and blaming the user for trying the software is self-defeating.
If anything, beta software should have lots of extra checking compiled into it; it might quit more often than released software and run slower, but it shouldn't crash in unexpected ways any more frequently, and it should definitely go out of its way to guard against data loss.
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.
Babar
The short answer is that the list of currently open window would be the list of currently open (=tabbed) pages; it this list were supplied as an explict collection (like History) when in "bookmark" or "collections" mode (what you get when you click on the "book" icon or hit option-cmd-B), you can basically have your tabs in one combo-key-stroke.
The whole story is spelled out here in my recent reply on a previous thread.
Please let me know if you think this could or could not work.
Babar
Apple has posted a Safari Update to address the serious bugs users have been reporting.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Apple can have some bone-headed stubbornness that makes them say moronic things like this, and never ever ever admit their error. Having external parties control Chimera will save it from the worst Apple-isms like a universally reviled Metal UI, tabs because some dimwit UI "expert" says they are bad, etc, while still keeping the better parts of Apple's OS design.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Well, not the one you detail, anyway.
How's that?
Simple. I'm downloading ten DIVX files right now. TEN. AT ONCE. Thank you.
The number of files you can download at any given time is a *preference*. I made a lot of hotheaded mistakes with Safari when I was first using it- this was one of them.