The Safari Image of Doom — There is a link in here that is the tip of the Safari browser iceberg of misery. Please safari users, move to Firefox.
Now, before you click and view the following image, if you happen to be using Apple’s Safari or possibly OmniWeb, you may want to commit www.drunkenblog.com to memory, as there’s a very high likelihood your browser is about to crash…
Safari Image of Doom — Click Here
When Safari tries to load the image, or any application based on WebCore or WebKit tries to load it, it seems to create a race condition in one log and/or a deadlock in another, which ends in a crash pretty quickly. Don’t be too mislead by that, as my log reading skills are dull to say the least.
Sometimes it takes a reload to do it, but it’s highly likely to go wonky. The image itself is just a simple animated .GIF file that was used as an advertisement on a site. While there is obviously something abnormal about it it isn’t immediately obvious to me what’s wrong with it.
It displays correctly in Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based browsers, but something is causing it to choke webkit. Even worse, its causing webkit to crash. An image should never cause Safari, or WebKit, to do this.
Umm… using the latest Safari build on 10.3… I have no problems at all, loads fine.
It was very interesting reading your post, but funny thing is, I clicked on the picture and it worked just fine. Must be in older versions of Safari that the picture doesn’t work.
Love the Twit Podcast!
~Joshann
Apple’s choice of going with KHTML is truly baffling. Granted, it has a small, tight codebase and is fairly standards compliant, but that’s it.
Apple users have to contend with the disadvantages of using a minority platform, so Apple compounds this by giving a web browser based upon an engine that has virtually zero marketshare? Then, to top it off, Safari isn’t even crossplatform. How on earth are the majority of web devs supposed to test it?
Apple needs to put its weight behind Firefox. The first order of business should be supplanting IE. If open standards don’t win, then any browser that isn’t IE/Avalon will simply be irrelevant.
If only we could reverse engineer this effect to target IE we could finally put an end to it. Imagine people posting images to deliberately crash IE it would be hilarious to say the least.
I ran the jhove object validator on this file and it reports that it is a well formed and valid gif 89a file. You can see the output yourself here:
http://24.63.231.144/files/output2.txt
I would say this is a bug with a certain version of the browser, and not due to an invalid or corrupt file.
Of course I have Firefox on my Mac. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to post to this broke-ass blog 🙂
I prefer Safari because its faster. I only have a Mac mini, you see. I miss the live bookmark feature from Firefox, and I’m quite baffled as to why Safari doesn’t have it (or something really close) since Apple tooted the RSS horn like mad when Tiger came out.
Yes, the ad crashes Safari quite quickly, but it is a broke piece of the web I’ve never even seen before. I’m pretty sure that every browser can be crashed by something intentionally.
As a Mac user, I have found it amusing how many Safari users think this site is “broken” when no other browsers have a problem parsing it.
And when another example of a bug in Apple’s webkit is given, many still think it is a problem with the animated gif – and not Safari.
It was interesting to see an update at the end of the blog entry:
“Update 3: That was fast. From Eric Peyton @ Apple: “Saw your crasher today. Filed it as radar 4233417: ‘Image crashes IOImage code’ with Apple. You won’t be able to see it, but it will hopefully get addressed.”
Yep, sounds like it’s just that gif – doesn’t it? 🙂
BB. at the time Apple was leaning towards an open source engine, it originally looked at gecko as a base, even mozilla admits that… but they were not anywhere near where they are now. KHTML was smaller, lighter, and faster than Gecko at that time period. For the time, I can see why it was a better choice.
Even further, they’re moving onto CSS3 specs:
http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=22
which puts them further ahead of the game.
Still no answer as to why the original author hates safari, nothing in this blog reflects any valid point as to why.
“Yep, sounds like it’s just that gif – doesn’t it? 🙂
Comment by Mike Voice — 8/27/2005 @ 8:32 pm ”
I’s likely a combination of the two.
For example, a friend of mine mailed me a DVD he made. Yesteray I first watched it in Media Center (running on an XBox) and at a certain point the video began to hang up. It did all the things you’d see with a really dirty DVD, or a defective burn.
I got tired of watching all that junk so I put it in my Mac, and it runs pretty much perfectly, There was only one spot where I noticed a very very slight hickup, and I’m sure I woudln’t have noticed if I hadn’t watched the DVD go totally batshit earlier at that same spot in the recording.
Is it the XBox’s fault? No, its the DVD, and…sort of the XBoxes fault. Obviously a different player plays the DVD just fine, but honestly the DVD is really to blame.
This thing with the image is a similar case, I’d say. Safari obviously needs to be fixed since a crash this bad can really set you back.
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