from Hacker News

Typing “old” (space) into iOS Safari crashes the app

by lunchbreak on 11/14/22, 5:37 PM with 180 comments

  • by numpad0 on 11/14/22, 6:49 PM

    For those not reproducing: your device may have to reside CONUS for some of "tar"(-get), "bes"(-tbuy), "wal"(-mart), "wel"(-ls fargo), "old"(-navy?), "sta"(-rbucks), "pla"(-net fitness?) to work. Try local brands, e.g., "Harrods", "Tesco", "Picard", etc. For my country "Gusto", a casual dining franchise, reproduces the issue. List is from [1].

    Edit: stopped reproducing here as of 19:11 UTC.

    Edit: some people digged into it[2][3], [2] includes partial endpoint URLs. Apparently this was happening for 7+^H^H 10+ hour.

    1: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/14/safari-search-crash-bug...

    2: https://twitter.com/nejigami/status/1592174411712712706

    3: https://twitter.com/take6556/status/1592100775119171584

  • by TechBro8615 on 11/14/22, 7:53 PM

    They really, really don't want you using old.reddit.com

    Doesn't reproduce for me btw. I also have the setting disabled that adds a period when typing a space twice, if that matters.

  • by obituary_latte on 11/14/22, 6:59 PM

    Unfortunately, connecting MacOS Safari debugging crashes the debugger when the iOS Safari crashes as far as I can tell.
  • by avanai on 11/14/22, 6:23 PM

    “Best “ does it for me. 16.1.1

    Turning off “Safari Suggestions” in settings fixes it.

  • by ok_dad on 11/14/22, 6:24 PM

    None of the strings crashed my safari, I'm on whatever the newest version of iOS is, just updated it yesterday.

    edit: Also, I'm on the iPhone 11 or 12 I think? So maybe model has something to do with it?

  • by jaywalk on 11/14/22, 7:01 PM

    I had a bunch of open tabs in Safari, and typing "old" (space) not only crashed Safari but got rid of almost all of the open tabs. It was all stuff I needed to refer back to, and yeah that's not a great way to manage stuff like that. Of course bookmarks would be the right way. But now it's gone.

    So be careful.

  • by jakedata on 11/14/22, 6:54 PM

    "Turning off “Safari Suggestions” in settings fixes it." I should have turned that off before. It certainly stopped this one weird crash.
  • by hnews_account_1 on 11/14/22, 6:39 PM

    It crashes for me without even typing the space at the end. Works for best too.
  • by josefresco on 11/14/22, 6:42 PM

    Imagine having a domain or business name starting with "old" - nightmare scenario!

    Old Spice, Old Navy...

  • by netsharc on 11/14/22, 6:21 PM

    Can someone contribute more than "lol, me too!" and figure out which API endpoint it's hitting, what it's returning and guess why it's crashing? I don't have an iOS device otherwise I'd do it...
  • by skykooler on 11/14/22, 6:34 PM

    In my case I don't even need to type the space - the moment I press "d" it crashes.
  • by whoisjuan on 11/14/22, 6:47 PM

    “best “

    “bedt “

    “old “

    “wel “

    “dta “

    All of these crash safari in iOS for me.

    What’s strange about this bug is that it happened overnight for multiple iOS version.

    It seems to be a server bug that happens with the requests that populate the suggestions.

    Turning off safari suggestions fixes it.

  • by nneonneo on 11/14/22, 7:02 PM

    I wonder if a crash log gets generated - Settings -> Privacy -> Analytics & Improvements -> Analytics Data will have it if so. Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the issue on my phone (iOS 16.1, Canada)
  • by sneak on 11/14/22, 9:04 PM

    Turning off Safari Suggestions is one of the first and most important privacy tweaks on a new iPhone. Otherwise every keystroke you type in the address bar gets sent to Apple in realtime.
  • by omoikane on 11/14/22, 6:45 PM

    Reminds me of the bug where certain strings would crash apple products.

    https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-4124

    https://xkcd.com/1957/

  • by lizardactivist on 11/14/22, 10:07 PM

    You thought only a bug inside your app could crash it?

    Now your browser can crash because of a bug on a server, somewhere, which you weren't planning on browsing to, let alone even knew existed.

    The future truly is here.

  • by Overtonwindow on 11/14/22, 6:17 PM

    No, doesn’t crash for me.
  • by TheMechanist on 11/15/22, 2:46 AM

    Has anybody reproduced this in… Firefox (on iOS of course)?

    Asking for a friend who has Safari search suggestions disabled (so Safari does not crash) but encounters Firefox crashes regularly.

  • by fonix on 11/14/22, 6:19 PM

    just got beta 2 installed and it did infact crash in safari
  • by gjsman-1000 on 11/14/22, 6:55 PM

    For goodness sake Apple - this takes the cake for weirdest bug since the early Windows 10 Preview build which caused random letters to be missing from text...
  • by shon on 11/14/22, 7:51 PM

    Can confirm. For me a reboot, administered immediately after 3 consecutive crashes a few hours ago, seemed to fix the issue.
  • by deafpolygon on 11/14/22, 6:36 PM

    Haven't updated to 16.1.1 and no issues.
  • by QuadmasterXLII on 11/14/22, 6:18 PM

    in my phone nothing happens with "old ", but reproduced with okd

    doesn't crash in private mode

  • by gnicholas on 11/14/22, 6:57 PM

    Huh, not replicable for me, in 16.1, on iPhone 13 Mini on EN-US. Was this added in 16.1.1?
  • by DefineOutside on 11/14/22, 6:50 PM

    Crashes for me with "old" on iOS 16.0 with an iPhone 11
  • by alkonaut on 11/14/22, 6:08 PM

    No it doesn’t. Better repro steps needed.

    Edit: best guess so far: something regional or language dependent? Looks like US-specific search suggestions?

    My non-crashing circumstances:

    (iPhone11, iOS 15.6.1, Swedish language, in Sweden)