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Search Suggestions Causing Apple's Safari Browser To Crash on Many Devices (theverge.com)
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."
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.
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.
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 their applications by making calls to something like /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreData.framework/Versions/A/CoreData. If you run into problems with CoreData, you can upgrade once and fix it across all applications. It's almost like that concept of "libraries" and "shared code" or "code reuse" and "small programs that do one thing and do it well" that they used to talk about in the Linux world before SystemD.