Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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 all the user would see is a broken search still.
And the BBC article was just updated. The servers were sending junk between two times. That got cached in the suggestions cache on the browser. They recommend you clear the cache now and try again.