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."

Comments

Not here

[Ol Olsoc]

Not on Safari at the moment, but I've had no such problems.

Re:Not here

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

No idea. I'm using Safari here but I'm still on dial-up so maybe that's why I haven't had that probl{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

Re:Not here

[ledow]

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.

Re:Not here

[Ol Olsoc]

Thank you for that. Your hugely statistically significant data point will add so much to the discussion.

Touchy this morning? I've been testing it out, now that I'm in Safari at home, and it still isn't crashing.

And perhaps people's browsers that are not crashing might offer some insight into those that are. Just sayin'.

Re: Not here

[Ol Olsoc]

Firefox user here. Never had problems with Safari crashing either. Neither has my mom, dog nor my desk lamp (neither of which uses Safari...or computers for that matter).

I think this is just a small issue that affects a minority of users that is being blown way out of proportion by Apple haters.

Exactly.

this is why

[Thud457]

you don't need a SQL database to track your browser search history.

Re:this is why

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Apple

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Yeah, no kidding. If this happens 99 more times then I might as well be using Windows!

Re:Apple

[squiggleslash]

When did they do that?

The original iPhone was so locked to at&t you weren't even allowed to use a different, non-iPhone, at&t SIM card with it.

It took Apple years to sell unlocked cellphones, and that was largely pressure from the EU where they weren't even allowed to enter certain markets until they did.

The only thing that's caused a disconnect of the cellphone from the carrier is the GSM family of standards, which finally, at last, has become a global standard that almost every carrier in the world is finally transitioning to (through LTE, GSM's 4G iteration.)

Meanwhile, Apple's seeking to undo that by advocating for the removal of physical SIM cards, locking devices to carriers just like in the old days.

Re:Good old BBC

[ledow]

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.

Re:Good old BBC

[chmod a x mojo]

Yes! The bad response and garbage data from the search server is the PRIMARY issue here that uncovered a SECONDARY bug in the application.

It's simple fucking logic: Bad response from server triggers bug in the software, therefore the primary problem that is at hand is the servers barfing and sending bad data.

The secondary issue discovered is that the application crashes with an unhandled exception when sent bad data. It HAS to be a secondary problem since the program won't crash without being sent bad data, and there is no way for the program to CAUSE the server to send bad data ( in this case ) even after crashing.

Both are bad things, but as long as the search servers are sending good data the secondary issue isn't as bad, since it won't crop up at all. That isn't saying it shouldn't be fixed ( of course it should ), or that it is a trivial bug, just that as long as everything else works it won't be a problem.... just like it wasn't a problem up until now.

Damn, it is really stupidly simple cause and effect chains. How can people not see it plain as day?