Apple Safari users suffer crashes | Hacker News Reader

Apple Safari users suffer crashes

bbc.com

78 pointsSlashmanX102 comments

I've tried to like Safari. It's certainly snappier than the alternatives. It's fast and seems light. I'll go as far as to say I want to like Safari. As a heavy iPhone and Mac user, going all in on Safari would buy me a lot. In a similar vein, I want to like Firefox - even more so than Safari. An open source web browser by a non-profit? Sign me up. That's an excellent concept to rally behind.

But...

I can't ditch Chrome. I know it eats up resources like it's nobody's business, I know it's probably tracking me, I hate that it wants me to 'log in' like it's some sort of operating system, but I just can't kick the habit.

I think it's the tabs. For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions. It's also the best file downloader, the most configurable, has the best extension ecosystem. It manages to be the best pro-user's browser, and the best layperson's browser at the same time.

I still have all three browsers sitting in my dock. I just use Chrome by default.

I can't ditch Firefox for the exact same reason! I NEED to have my tabs on the left side or the right side. I can't have it in the top because I end up not seeing any titles, just favicons, and that doesn't really give me anything.

Try the Firefox Developer Edition or Aurora (Alpha channel, rarely crashes but the performance is much better than current stable) together with TreeStyleTabs. Maybe that will help you out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I recently installed vimium on chrome, and being able to quick navigate to a specific tab via keyboard (by typing the title or selecting it from a list) has completely eradicated my issue with finding tabs on chrome. There's something like vimium on Firefox, but I haven't really looked into it. I mainly use chrome because I use chrome. I just don't feel like putting the energy into setting up Firefox how I like it. currently, my chrome history is synced between a bunch of devices nicely. Between setting up that and having to find alternatives to all the addons I use, making the switch just doesn't sound fun.

> There's something like vimium on Firefox

Vimperator. It offers more functionality/hackability than Vimium as well (not that vimium is bad - I'm a happy user of both firefox/vimperator and chrome/vimium).

Fun trick I learned with Chrome: Click a tab, then shift-click another tab. The tabs should darken, and if you drag them, they all move as a unit. Very handy when you have sessions that kind of diverged and you'd like to mentally separate them.

I can't recommend the Tree Style Tabs FF add-on enough for these kinds of "large sessions that diverge into many sub-sessions". If you ctrl-click a link, this add-on creates a new child-tab of the current tab and loads the link there. It kind of builds little spanning trees of the WWW graph, which seems to be a very natural way of browsing the web, but you can also organize these tab trees completely freely with drag & drop.

You can select tabs using your normal item selecting techniques, including control and shift.

I wish all browsers would inherit this, that is a very powerful thing.

For me it's the address bar - (desktop) Safaris hiding of everything to the right domain name annoys me - over hiding useful info

You can change that - "Show full website address" in Advanced options.

You can change that by going to settings. In the "Advanced" tab you can check "Show full website address".

I think you're just used to Chrome. There isn't really that much seperating Chrome, Safari, and Firefox these days.

Not true. I went from Chrome to FF, but after 6 months on FF I was just too annoyed to stay on FF. It was mainly the crashes in one tab taking down the entire browser, but there were a lot of things that annoyed the crap out of me. Going back to Chrome felt like a weight was lifted from my shoulders.

Did you find out what was causing the crashes? I'm curious because FF is rock solid for me. I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you.

Having used Firefox since it was Firebird (lol), I can tell you it goes through noticeable cycles of being awesome and just plain bad. Working hard to become the fastest browser an example of the former, and the whole Pocket fiasco being an example of the latter.

ATM I use Safari as my main browser, Firefox for testing websites and some other plugins, and Chrome for the built-in Flash (I don't have Flash on my system).

Chrome forced the rest to become better.

That's a good point. The emergence of Chrome certainly lit a fire under Firefox's ass. Being "just" better than IE6 was no longer good enough.

I was the same, but eventually Chrome's slowness and resource-intensiveness (this is on OS X, of course) drove me to Safari.

Chrome is still my 'dev' browser though, and having the two separate is actually quite nice.

That's my setup, essentially. Chrome as my 'dev' browser, as I'm too familiar with its devs tools.

Another nice thing about having a browser only for development is that, when you're demo'ing, there's less of a risk to show unwanted stuff (e.g. address bar suggestions). :)

> Another nice thing about having a browser only for development is that, when you're demo'ing, there's less of a risk to show unwanted stuff

I go a little further and use distinct Chrome profiles for every project to avoid this. It also helps to keep saved credentials for e.g. client-specific SaaS accounts separate without commingling them with my own 1Password vault.

*I know 1Password now supports multiple vaults, but I haven't had a chance to try that workflow yet.

This is me exactly. I can't stand the UI in FF. It seems to change too much and it's ugly. There are probably plugins to help with that, but I haven't invested the time to look into it. It's also hard to kick the Chrome dev tools.

How is FF ugly? I don't find the UI very different from Chrome and Safari.

I don't get how he thinks it's ugly or different.

Not only is it very similar but, unlike Chrome or Safari, every aspect of it is customizable so you can make it look however you want. Out of the box you can rearrange the the UI elements to match Chrome or Safari.

I absolutely hate the FF UI. I WANT to use FF, I actually switched a few months ago and did it for a couple of months. I THINK my problem (I say think because I feel like someone will measure the pixel and say I'm wrong) is that it feels like there is a ton of wasted space between the tabs, above the tabs. etc. I can't control the size of the top bars and they're huge compared to chrome. I'm a fan of tiny icons and very, very compact UIs so that I can get more on the screen at once. Here's my comparison on a 28" monitor https://www.dropbox.com/s/k32gln7s3ev5a7t/Screenshot%202016-...

Perhaps give Tree Style Tabs on FF a try.

Hang on the chrome UI at the top takes up a couple of mm more vertically than the FF one. What other differences are there?

You might try the "Custom Tab Width" add-on to shrink your Firefox tabs. I also like to set my toolbar bookmarks' names to an empty string, so my toolbar is just a bunch of bookmark favicons.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-tab-wi...

For me it's the other way around, I use FF for everything but dev sessions where I use Chrome (I prefer it's dev tools).

I tried breaking the habit for a while but I ended up opening FF all the time by muscle memory.

Plugins can get you a very compact ui: http://paste.click/XfPZOR

I'm also a fan of minimal as possible.

It's quite different, and because of XUL it also falls in the uncanny valley of looking like native widgets but not behaving exactly like them.

I'd say FF Developer Edition has the best UI out of all of them.

Nothing fits better next to a terminal window or a code editor.

I don't know what it is, but I agree. There is something subtly and subconsciously going on that nudges me away from FF too. I think it's the loose feeling UI, the default smiley face icon of the chat that I don't know anyone uses, the paper airplane as the share icon. It's that there is still not unified search/address bar even if one would prefer it without running a poorly executed extension. It's that the tabs feel so childish with the far too rounded corners and loose padding and it's even the few pixels more of padding between the address bar and the tabs boundary. It's the small font of the address bar, it's the disproportionately large back button, it's the apparent lack of design and style requirements for extension icons that make them look blurry and generally shitty and bolted on in the UI, etc.

I know that all that maybe sounds rather petty and maybe there's something wrong with me and it's my biases for some reason, but it just all adds up to a fuzzy notion of childishness and less than "down to business" feel. I say that as someone that used to exclusively use FF and shunned Chrome for all the various reasons mentioned by others.

Care to list those reasons. Genuinely interested, and not sure which reasons you are referring to.

For UI check out Firefox Dev Edition, clean and classy alternative. And the dev tools take some time, but they're likeable for sure.

The problem I have with FF dev tools is that json responses are hideous, just one long string. Where Chrome's look like json with expandable fields.

In the network panel (in FF), I have a structured view on JSON data, and can expand nested objects and arrays (like here https://mdn.mozillademos.org/files/7421/nm-response-json.png). Same goes for JS objects, which is a thing that bugged me long time.

How can you live without FF's 3D DOM view?!

More seriously, FF's dev tools have felt more advanced than Chrome's for a while, including the ability to edit and resend an XHR request.

The 3D DOM view is really neat, but so far I haven't found a practical use for it.

Not all that different these days. http://imgur.com/qII55SM

The new FF UI has been out and stable for nearly two years now.

I'm assuming there's an extension to merge the URL and search bars to get Chrome-like behaviour?

Yes you can enable search suggestions in the URL bar right in the Firefox preferences and hide the separate search box. I keep them separate because I don't care to have everything I type in the URL bar be sent to Google by default.

Exactly. The divide between address bar and search bar is a much under-appreciated privacy feature.

Omnibar is what you're looking for.

FF changes the UI very frequently. Even the last update from 42 to 43 had changes. I love FF and its my only browser but this is one of the most irritating things they do. Maintaining a standard UI is a must to retaining users (and keeping them upgrading).

I think you are underestimating the impact of the subtle nature of the differences. For me, it really kind of annoys me that FF seems to have a looser UI than Chrome. It's those couple of pixels of padding between address bar and tabs, it's the wider/longer tab due to padding, etc..

And now that I think about it, it's even things like the tab behavior where Chrome condenses tabs and FF just pushes them out of view an adds the disgusting scroll UI. Maybe that's a personal preference thing, but I would very much prefer having a dense overview rather than having what is essentially a nested scrolling.

disclosure: I'm a firefox user.

>I think it's the tabs. [...] It's also the best file downloader

In what way? The only difference I can see is the download status bar, but that's available on firefox as an extension.

>the most configurable

debatable, considering firefox has a bunch of about:config options, whereas chrome has a few configurable flags.

>has the best extension ecosystem.

Can you elaborate this? My impression was that firefox's ecosystem was better because addons can do more (thanks to XUL), whereas chrome addons are limited to glorified userscripts.

> In what way? The only difference I can see is the download status bar, but that's available on firefox as an extension.

Yes, I've tried to replicate Chrome's UI with Firefox extension. But it feels like I'm using extensions. Furthermore, I really don't enjoy configuring browsers because between work, school, and hobbies I use a lot of different machine. For this reason, if I'm using firefox, it's usually with the default UI... which is not my personal preference.

>> has the best extension ecosystem.

> Can you elaborate this?

Take a cursory glance at each of the two stores:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions

Aesthetically speaking, the firefox add ons page is the Tux Racer to chrome's Mario Kart.

One has the passion and enthusiasm of well respected open source volunteers behind it, and the other has a sleek high quality shine only our dear corporate overlords could deliver. This is minor, but it sets the mood the for the whole experience of add ons. (Of which, I only need uBlock Origin"). In general, it's easier to find what I'm looking for, see what's trending, and generally browse for extensions in the chrome store. EDIT: The chrome store is also much faster and more responsive.

Aside from that, Chrome seems to have more active developers because of it's better brand name. On /r/cscareerqustions, for example, you'll hear people ask about ideas for resume-boosting side projects. One of the first answers is usually "make a chrome extension". I have yet to see anyone say "make a firefox extension" or "make a cross platform browser extension".

Either way, it's all personal preference. I'm sure you prefer a different model car, style of clothing, and a favorite color than me too. It's all ok. There's no right answer here.

>One has the passion and enthusiasm of well respected open source volunteers behind it, and the other has a sleek high quality shine only our dear corporate overlords could deliver. This is minor, but it sets the mood the for the whole experience of add ons.

Doesn't Mozilla spend a lot on Firefox development? Like in the hundreds or tens of millions of dollars range? They have very nice and grand offices, lavish even interns with expense paid trips and food, so I don't really know what you're talking about.

[Edit: They spend $212M on Software Development in 2014 alone]

E.g. https://ryanseys.com/blog/summer-at-mozilla/

>Interns at Mozilla, myself included, are truly spoiled rotten. Competitive pay, free travel/housing, free snacks/drinks and catered lunches every week were really just icing on the massive cake that was my internship!

>Oh, and did I mention that Mozilla also sent me to Paris, France?! Yeah, it happened. For my final working week, myself and a handful of the Identity team met up in the Paris office and hacked on Persona, and ate… and drank… a lot!

http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mozillas-amazing-offic...

http://ngokevin.com/blog/mozilla-day-one/

What kind of open source volunteers have perks like these?

Sorry, I don't understand what point you're making. I was strictly speaking about the aesthetics of their extensions pages. Those were descriptions of the impressions they give.

I was purposefully judging the book by it's cover, because I was talking strictly about the cover. I know FireFox is a brilliant piece of engineering and I never mentioned Mozilla. Red Hat spends a lot on Linux development too, doesn't mean anything about the aesthetics of the platform.

The aesthetics of the FF addon marketplace are the way they are because Mozilla neglected that property for many years. There's currently a new initiative to redesign and build out an updated version of the marketplace, so expect the design to look like the chrome one soon.

>the most configurable, has the best extension ecosystem.

that's why I haven't left chrome. I HATE some of the stuff they (google) do, but I can make this my browser and I like the overall appearance

Can you force it not to download binary blobs that turn on your microphone?

I came in here, to share my experience between Safari and Chrome, and it looks like you've iterated exactly the same sentiment. After El Capitan came out, and the changes to Safari, I REALLY gave it a shot. A sleek interface, and certainly fast, but it chews through RAM at an insane rate. There is no rhyme or reason to it, I can have a fresh window open, restore previous session of ten tabs, and after a few hours, each tab starts consuming 5GB+ of RAM until everything is exhausted. Chrome(Canary) on the other hand, twice as many tabs open, and it never runs away with RAM usage. It still uses a hundred megs per tab, but none of them go crazy. I need to have every browser under the sun installed for testing, but Chrome is the only thing I can keep opening without killing my Mac Pro that has 28GB of RAM.

Its hard to parse these responses because everyone says that their browser that they don't use uses RAM at ridiculous rates.

I use every browser, Safari primarily since El Capitan. It was only in the last week or so that I've just had enough of dealing with it killing my machine. I had to systematically kill each tab process on a regular basis.

This is exactly the same experience I have had. I gave Safari a few months, added extensions, etc. I just found myself banging my head against the wall over certain things that Chrome had natively that Safari choose not to have.

I think it's the tabs. For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions.

You might like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I use Chrome for the Duplicate Tab feature.

Being logged into chrome is really the best feature they offer. I love having all my tabs on all my devices, and a unified omnibox history and all that.

Until Chrome has Tree Style Tabs, it's not a viable competitor to FF for me.

Chrome is a fine development environment though.

> It's certainly snappier than the alternatives.

I recently got a new, high-end Macbook Pro (16GB, 1TB SSD, i7 2.8Gz). I've been a long-time Chrome user, but I figured this would be a good time to try Safari: I've heard good things about it's energy usage.

I used Safari as my primary browser for about 2 weeks, and just switched back to Chrome. Safari wasn't bad, but it seems to take a LONG time to make connections to websites. And sometimes it would just hang indefinitely. At first I thought this was a machine issue, but all my other networking apps (Chrome, Postman, etc.) return immediately.

Like parent comment, I really want to like Safari...

Energy usage? What would the difference in energy used be for Chrome vs. Safari vs. Firefox?

Check out this article, or google around for others. Apple has spent a lot of time making Safari more efficient to extend battery life:

http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/google-chrome-vs-safari-battery-li...

Ah. I wasn't thinking of batteries.

'The Great Suspender' has been invaluable for me (a heavy tab user) in clawing back some system resources.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

Firefox's tab groups, combined with "Don't load tabs until I click on them", are what I use to deal with dozens of tabs. Though being able to have more groups sat in the background with comparatively little performance hit definitely feeds my tab addiction...

I really like Safari on OS X. It's my go-to browser on my personal machine, and on my work machine, it's my "personal" browser (I'm typing this into safari). I use Chrome for my work stuff.

But maybe this is down to your tab preferences. I simply hate tabs. To me, they're the sign of a failed window manager. I don't feel it's the job of every application to reinvent the UX wheel and implement tab functions differently from every other application.

Maybe some day an operating system will support tabs natively?

> For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions

Wait, what? For me, Chrome is utterly unusable for “research sessions” (aka routine browsing). It starts chewing up resources like crazy and completely falls over when I try using it for any amount of time with 25+ tabs open. Google’s non-search webapps seem to be particular offenders: more than a few tabs of them open in Chrome brings my fast laptop to its knees.

Firefox is good up to about 100 tabs, but becomes a big CPU and memory hog and inevitably crashes after a day or two.

In Safari, I routinely keep 200+ tabs open for weeks at a time with no problem (though eventually I start running out of system memory; not sure if there’s a slow memory leak, or if badly written websites just require indefinitely large amounts when kept open, or what; usually by that point there’s a new security update to install in any case).

Right now I have an insane 503 tabs open in Chrome. (Sometimes I'm lazy, and I forget to clean up.)

But I have 32GB RAM. And The Great Suspender, which is a must-have for anyone who uses Chrome.

Sometimes I really worry how much I depend on software written by Apple.

On the weirder end of Safari bugs, mine can only open t.co (Twitter short link) URLs about 1/4 of the time. The rest of the time it sits there, eventually telling me the server is not responding. Apparently it is a bug at a "lower level than Webkit". The mind boggles as to what it actually is, and it's been like this for months.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/22/10813862/Safari-sucks-at-t...

This was driving me mad for ages. I was blaming Twitter and my connection until I finally discovered it was Safari. This was the last straw for me. Having Safari on my desktop synced with my iPhone is so useful. Safari credit card and password storage works better than Chromes (imo) and I find it superior in almost every other way. But with todays issue, the t.co issue, and another issue where my entire Mac would randomly freeze and require a forced reboot on some videos (not sure if it was flash or HTML5) I've just had to give up and switch to Chrome.

They both show worrying things to me:

- app crashing because a remote server is down? Bad coding. Bad QA. What else is lurking in that codebase?

- weird bug affecting one domain? Fix it. Twitter is not a small site. But it's been months and they still haven't fixed it.

>app crashing because a remote server is down? Bad coding. Bad QA. What else is lurking in that codebase?

That happens all the time with all kinds of apps, which nethertheless might be indispensable.

If only it were open source, then we could check.

If only it were open source and its users had both the knowledge required, the time AND cared enough to check.

What's so special about t.co? No other sites are having a problem. Sounds like Twitters problem.

If you read the article you'll see an Apple engineer confirm it is a problem with Apple's code.

They confirmed that they're working on it but it's not clear that it was a purely a problem with Apple's code. Given all of the well-documented general stability problems t.co has had over the years it would not surprise me to learn that Chrome has a more aggressive recovery mode from a bad DNS server, failures returned by only one of the multiple servers which that hostname resolves to, etc.

I've seen plenty of t.co errors in Firefox as well as Safari, but never in Chrome and the network stack is one of the areas where they've clearly put a lot of effort.

When Hatcher said it was "lower level than WebKit," I took that to mean it has something to do with iOS/OS X's built-in Twitter integration.

Seems like it could be DNS resolvers as well...

That's what I was thinking as well: DNS, possibly something like the way their IPv6/4 reachability checks work (Happy Eyeballs is new enough to make that very easy to believe), etc.

The bug may have been uncovered by a server change, but Safari really shouldn't be crashing just because it can't reach the suggestions server.

That is, frankly, pisspoor QA by Apple.

It isn't just crashing Safari but does a full OS reboot on my 5c running 9.2.1 (which is the latest release iOS version as of today).

It's also affecting the Settings search apparently

Yep. Hence it's barking the wrong tree to frame this as primarily Safari's fault.

Appears to be caused be search suggestions in Safari address bar, which seems to be server side so it's affecting various versions of software.

Reddit thread linked in article: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/42wle1/safari_crashi...

As someone owning an iPad Air and thus forced to use mobile Safari, this is hardly any news for me.

Back in 7.1 scrolling or zooming a page "too fast" led to an immediate crash. Onto 8.0, it still did but the threshold was apparently raised a bit. It was finally fixed before 9.0 but now fullscreen HTML5 video playing starts to crash randomly. Even worse, sometimes the page just goes blank and you have to reload it - The last time this happened I had spent five minutes filling a form. Hilariously, the preview interface still shows the actual page, so I managed to click the submit button by mapping its position from the preview.

Opera trying to capitalize https://twitter.com/coastbrowser/status/692367086631391232

Upon upgrading to Yosemite two years ago, Safari stopped working completely on two out of my three Macs (one brand new, bought just months before) with the third one intermittently working. Apple's software quality is really a joke and Safari is the new IE in many ways. Its support for standards is behind every other major browser and it hardly ever opens without crashing. Why would I use such shitty software when I'm not forced to? I avoid iTunes for the exact same reasons except when Apple forces me to use it to put music on their devices. The core OS X system is generally solid (other than the myriad of wireless issues Apple can't seem to ever solve) but the apps that come with it range from substandard to total shit quality.

Anybody else noticed how Safari doesn't seem to get Javascript exceptions right? Errors often have no stack trace, or their information is of limited use.

At least, that is what I am experiencing lately.

Chrome/Chromium, on the other hand, almost always gives me the information I need.

No, but if you're relying on sourcemaps to get useful information you might want to confirm that the toolchain is producing fully-valid sourcemaps. I saw some very odd failures while that stabilized.

Works fine for me (Mac OS X), and I guess am one of the few who prefers Safari.

Works for me as well. Are you by any chance using duck duck go as your default search provider?

Works fine for me too and I'm using DuckDuckGo on both iOS and Mac.

I use DuckDuckGo as well and I was affected by this.

Works fine for me on OSX as well, but since this morning all our iOS devices have the browser crash when tapping the address bar.

No problem at work or at home. Must be something we don't have.

I experienced this issue earlier today. I assumed my Safari had gotten corrupted somehow, crazy that a serverside issue would bring down the browser like that.

I haven't experienced this issue but the last month I have been getting a lot of tabs crashing and reloading. Anyone else with the same problem? It's not related to any particular site. Some text about the page had a problem and had to be reloaded is displayed in a status bar above the page beneath the tabs.

Still broke on my iPhone. Not sure a server change should break my iPhone internets, very poor.

No issues here on the latest El Capitan and iOS.

Though I wonder if this isn't "accidental" sabotage on Google's part. Wouldn't be the first time. Didn't something from their side break something just for Apple users not long ago? But then again, they have lots of Mac users inside their own company..

Safari needs to start respecting HTML5 input validations.

From all the things mentioned in this post, that's probably the last thing it needs.

Most browsers out in the wild don't support them anyway, and that's something for developers to worry -- most pages implement their own JS based validations on the client anyway.

This is pretty sad Apple.

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