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? =-
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 downloaded Safari and it was like beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep. It was a really good slashdot post, too.
Relax I am an Apple user.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
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.
[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
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 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.