Safari 4: Apple's crash-happy shipper Apple's shiny new version 4 of its Safari browser is causing headaches among many users - including here at The Reg. Ever since we upgraded to version 4 from the remarkably stable beta version, Safari has crashed repeatedly - and we're not alone. Over on deep-Mac-geek website MacInTouch, numerous - but by no means all - …
I have to say it's been fine for me. I went with the beta, then upgraded a week after the full 4.0 came out and it's been fine. If anything, the full 4.0 reloads pages faster when using the Back button, which is nice. The only time I have ever had trouble with any version of Safari, it was due to 3rd party plugins. Ditto Quicktime FWIW (Perian plugin was the problem, but it's all good now).
This purported upgrade was forced down all 4 Macs in our house before I'd caught wind of it. Since it has dropped in like a turd in a brown paper bag on your front porch set allight. It tries to second guess (WRONGLY) URL's I'm going to that I know, it incorrectly fills things in, and worst of all, it renders things badly.
Having been an Apple fan for a very long time, this is worse than mere words can explain. I routinely keep 5-10 browser windows open in the background and through this mess of a supposed upgrade, it keeps losing window history when you restart all windows with the "Reopen all windows from last session" and it's like it has a lobotomy.
Perhaps I've found Steve's defective liver, I've certainly found a very defective browser!
I've got Safari 4 here and it's fine (I for the record my Mac is an old Intel one - Core Duo rather than the newer Core2 Duo). Is the problem related to having run the Beta (I never did)?
I guess you've tried resetting it? (Middle of the "Safari" Menu) and chucking the Safari stuff from the Library? (Is this all accounts? Or just one?)
What do the logs say about it?
I've got 5 macs between work and home and, while I usually just accept all the Apple upgrades, I decided to wait and see on this Safari 4.0. I've had no problem NOT upgrading to 4.0 while applying all the other recent Apple updates. All you have to do is uncheck one box. I'm glad I decided to wait a couple of weeks. Let's see what 4.1 brings.
Yet again that cult know as Apple (aka Jobsientology) have released a flagship product that is so buggy it makes Windows Me look stable.
When will people learn that Jobsientology is all form over function, as can be seen by the fact the Ipod is so limited in the codecs it can play or the completely stupid design of those mice.
It should be interesting listening to the fanniboys defend Jobsientology over this one.
A small number of users have problems and everyone starts equating it with the world collapsing. I've installed Safari 4 on both my machines and it's been stable as a rock - faster page loads, faster Javascript and all with a couple of InputManager plugins to boot.
As the local Mac guru, I've also recommended it to all my clients. Around 60 people in town have it running on a wide variety of hardware of differing vintages - PPC and Intel - and NOT ONE has had a single problem.
IMHO, Safari 4 rocks!
... not exactly a veteran user though, I didn't touch Safari properly on my system until the latest update, once I realised it works on google docs now and they added the one feature I liked of Opera (speed dial/top sites) I decided to give it a proper go. So far been solid, only plugin I'm using is adblock so maybe it's a compatibility issue with plugins... they should really have tested them though, firefox manages most of the time.
Oh - I did find it amusing that the official apple discussion board's search box is rendered incorrectly (it renders the rounded ends twice) - I'd have thought somebody over at apple that prowls the boards would have spotted that one at some point and got it fixed already. :S
A pint of grog - to Steve's health!! CHEERS! *clink*...
Perhaps it's my fingers being hardened by years of UNIX and my mind being numbed by Windows; but all these Mac-update-crashes ... seem to have passed me by.
My only gripes are that X window managers no longer work (though the rest of the X utilities seem to be fine) since Leopard and Apple supply a wonderful German/French/whatever language version; but they can not manage a British version of their interfaces (grr. Ubuntu and even Microsoft can and those grim American voices, ugh) and that, to me, is a little bad mannered.
Safari has always been a crash happy, hang happy browser for me, during 10.4 and 10.5 and V4 is no different. It seems to be certain pages that can be problematic so I can't wait for the process separation promised in Snow Leopard but most crashes are caused by flash. I firstly recommend safariadblock to get rid of flash ads but on top of that you can use safaricookies to maintain a whitelist-only cookie list, and my favourite of all, clicktoflash: http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master
Anyone that uses Safari is probably the same sort of person that insists on using Internet Explorer under Windows.
Both are pushed to you automatically and touted as important updates that should not be overlooked under any circumstances, but neither are actually forced on the user.
I'm sure it's only a coincidence that both browsers from the largest commercial OS producers are shit.
Suggesting that the Mac OS is shit because it's browser is shit reeks of pot, kettle, black. It is amusing though, and while things like this should probably teach Apple and their fanbois that thing about throwing stones in glass houses, I'm guessing that it won't.
I have been using Safari 4 since last August (Developer then Public Beta Versions - 10.4.11).
The Beta versions seemed to load pages faster, and the tabs were along the very top of the window ("Title" bar), and a little + appeared at the top right corner to add a new tab. Which was nice.
Rather worse than the disappearance of this feature, was that having allowed Software update to update the "final" version of Safari 4, I did not realise that opting to "Shutdown" meant permanently, as the computer would not start up the next day. Had to resort to 10.3 and do lots of reinstalling (countless updates of Java as well) to get back to 10.4.11..
Having now got Safari 4 installed again, it does not crash, but all bookmarks seem to have been lost.
I've installed it on 4 computers, 2 intel, 2 PPC – 1 tiger & 3 leopards.
My standard operating procedure, when I hear about everyone else having trouble, is to clean all my system caches, rotate logs, scan prefs, etc. before doing the installs.
To do this, I use maintenance.app (from titanium.free.fr) and applejack (applejack.sourceforge.net),
which overlap a bit in function.
No trouble.
As mentioned already here, I am also of the opinion that 99.9% of these frequent crashes are due to 3rd party Safari hacks getting in through the Input Manager route (adblockers, Saft, etc.), or Flash.
Flash on any platform that does start with a "W" is an utter shitestorm. The number of sites that are now plastered with video-enabled craptacular ads is off the scale. Uncheck "plugins", uncheck "java" and enjoy the web again with the best-of-breed browser.
I have used Safari since it came out - I like the fact that its cleaner and has a more Mac (obviously) UI than Firefox. I had a couple of crashes on my MB Pro unibody after installing v4 but none since then and I have it running on 4 machines from PPC to Intel. The update was optional - and I have waited on one machine - mostly because of laziness and because the beta is pretty good. I wonder what the actual 'failure' rate is. There are a few folks in the comments that have reported specific problems, but the vast majority of comments that are negative are simply that - negative - too much flaming in the comments section in general. Most are positive. I seem to recall that the last major update to Firefox was less than smooth... and Chrome... it hasn't even got a stable port outside of Windows. I look forward to updates to these great products - with the likely bumps in the road. At least these three products have attempted to maintain web standards. For those of you drawing parallels with MS Explorer 8... MS still has problems with CSS1 and 2 - it is hardly a comparison when that product is more than 1/2 a decade behind every other web browser in terms of rendering engines.
It wasn't that long enough in the distant past that I had to support several Macs for the graphics arts dept of my company and I truly despised dealing with extensions, fixing things with rezedit, or attempting to force TCP/IP configurations on our blissfully happy Appletalk bunch.
Glad to see things haven't improved since System 6, 7, or 8. Firefox is brilliant on my work Vista machine and my home Debian Lenny build.
Mines the one with the "NOT" symbol over the words Apple Snob.
I open lots and lots and lots and lots of browser windows: dozens of windows, each with dozens of tabs; iMac & Mini; Opera, Camino, OmniWeb, Safari 4.beta, Firefox; leave them up and running for days while I sort through all the literature... Last time I counted, my record stood at 200 simultaneous open links.
I haven't had a whisper of trouble in the any of them. The only 'issue' is that Safari doesn't play nicely with my Uni's "Outlook Web Access" server.
I agree with the theory that it's likely to be slipshod coding of third-party add-ons that confuse matters.
Wouldn't ya know it, it's not Apple's fault, it's gotta be those pesky add ons that all the nasty hackers use that cause the problems.
How dare users install software of their own choice and tinker with the inner creamy goodness that is the brave new world of Apple.
Here's a thought for you Mactards though, my XP SP1a (yeah, rly, I love my Psion Wavefinder and unfortunately the software'd break on SP2 or above) install has been running for nigh on 7 years now, it gets left running for days on end, it doesn't crash or hang unless there's a hardware problem (several PSUs later), it's choc full of 'hacker' tools that let me do things like network discovery, password recovery etc. for clients along with loads of 'tweaks' and hacks that let me use the machine the way *I* like instead of the way Bill wanted me to.
There's intermittent installs of antivirus, spyware removers etc. and guess what? Never a virus or anything more than a few tracking cookies and trust me, I spend *plenty* of time on the 'net.
Now toddle along and drink your koolaid like a good mactard or, shock horror, your machine will be unfashionable before you manage to stop it crashing.
Nobody I know has had any problems of note with Safari 4. That's across a company with an average of more than two Macs per person, and all the private Mac owners I know too.
But then, right at the top of the article were the words "Ever since we upgraded to version 4 from the remarkably stable beta version". Nobody I know installed the Safari 4 Beta n a production machine.
Perhaps some Mac user at El Reg would like to back up their user data, wipe and reinstall, and then update to Safari 4.0.1? Bet your problems would go away then.
Jimbo 7. Again. I don't get why you read the Apple articles at all. It's as predictable as rain at Glastonbury that he'll pop up with an inane comment or two - what exactly has Apple blocking OGG in HTML 5 got to with Safari crashing? Are you suggesting it's karma?! Or is that you, Mr Wales? Anyway. "It just works" It does. I presume it's the Windows and Linux fanboys (I run them all - OS agnostic) gloating at that particular piece of schadenfreude. Do you want to know a secret? Software crashes. Firefox took 5 releases at least of 3.0 before it was stable and 2.0 was a washout on most platforms. Mozilla have released the third RC in little over a week of FF 3.5. Chrome wasn't great to begin with. IE fans can come back when it actually renders pages properly. Safari 4.0 has crashed on me once. Well, when I say Safari, I mean Flash. If I can avoid Flash based sites, I do. It's a shit way of rendering web content. It has it's uses and they are mercifully few. So yes, some Apple software occasionally crashes shocker. Well done Rik. Sterling journalism mate.
seeing as I have always used Firefox on my macbook (in all its flaky goodness) even though I have installed the latest safari it does not get used so no problem here.
As for blaming third party add-ons , well when internet explorer goes tits up it is usually some plug in that causes it but Microsoft still get the blame. So Apple suck it in and sort it out firefox stops adons running when it knows they cause problems
I've installed it on a 2-gig Mac Mini, a similarly equipped iMac, both on 10.5.7 and a 4-year-old 1.67-gig Powerbook running 10.4.8. Runs better than anything else I've tried, including Firefox. Perhaps if folks quit bit-torrenting pron and warez all day their wretched pooters would work more reliably. Then again, I can't persuade Quark 8 to stop crashing every three minutes.
Credit where it's due: I've never seen Safari 4 crash. However, I *have* seen it crippled by Adobe's godawful OS X implementation of their bloated "media platform", known to most of us as Flash. Flash-heavy sites will often bring up the dreaded spinning beachball -- sometimes for well over a minute -- while Adobe's pathetic excuse of a plugin hogs all the system's resources for no adequately explored reason.
Flash is its own worst enemy. No wonder Apple aren't in any hurry to get it onto their iPhone.
(Incidentally, Safari 4's performance on Windows 7 is much better on Flash sites. And all you FOSS fans need to stop crowing too: Safari is based on the open-source WebKit engine. The same engine used by Android.)
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running safari 4 on a variety of machines- no problems with stability but rendering is a bit hit &miss. I think it uses a crystal ball given the speed it makes the render attempt though.
Possibly the Apple programmers have manged to code in the "jobsian reality distortion field" he he
"Here's a thought for you Mactards though, my XP SP1a (yeah, rly, I love my Psion Wavefinder and unfortunately the software'd break on SP2 or above) install has been running for nigh on 7 years now, it gets left running for days on end, it doesn't crash or hang unless there's a hardware problem (several PSUs later), it's choc full of 'hacker' tools that let me do things like network discovery, password recovery etc. for clients along with loads of 'tweaks' and hacks that let me use the machine the way *I* like instead of the way Bill wanted me to."
...and the same (with the exception of my -- to date -- being able to update my OS without that pesky software-breakage on dot-updates that you mention having <gr> and no need to upgrade the PSU) could be used to describe my 7+ year-old Mac G4 duallie. So what's your point?
(Yeah... I know... Why do I even bother expecting logic from someone who posts using the troll icon...? Silly me! ...Pity there isn't some way to block any comment that has the "troll alert"... Oh well -- gotta leave SOMETHING for El Reg's next upgrade!)
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As to the actual subject of the article -- with the exception of one page (an ArcView-based GIS page) that used to load but now fails -- I have had no problems with upgrading Safari on the aforementioned home G4 nor the office G5. I'm still getting used to the moved "refresh" button and, while these fifty-mumble-year-old eyes like the "make the pictures bigger when making the text bigger" function, it would be nice if there were some way to toggle it on and off; otherwise it goes like gangbusters as far as I can tell.
Because Idiots blame Apple for problems ("it DOESN'T just work, WTF?!?") caused by poorly-written or merely out-dated 3rd party add-ins (e.g., input managers), the logical thing for Apple will be to eliminate all third-party tools.
Apple doesn't exactly need a lot of encouragement to close off its systems, for exactly these "user experience" reasons.
Thanks an overflowing heap.
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