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0 pointslukestevens2mo ago0 comments

The most egregious bug/s I've encountered in recent years is the utterly cursed tab management in iOS Safari.

A couple of times a year it will just nuke all my open tabs (450-500) and present me with a delightful blank screen. Before that it will mislabel the active tab group on and off before giving up entirely.

Quick action on my part stops the destruction syncing & I usually end up recovering them on my Mac & then save them as a tab group.

But literally just an hour ago, iOS Safari looked like it nuked ALL MY TAB GROUPS. Ugh. They were gone; swiping right led to the "New tab group" screen. Frantic backing up and a restart later, and the tab groups are back, as though the phone was like "just kidding!". FML. So much for that backup plan.

UI bugs are one thing, but how is that level of data loss acceptable in a modern operating system? Boggles the mind.

(And don't get me started on the UI track wreck that is the iOS-inspired/inflicted bookmark management on macOS Safari, where all Mac UI conventions went out the window for some reason.)

0 comments

squeaky-clean2mo ago

Very often I'll close a tab, realize I need to open it again for some reason, long press on the + button and it just isn't there. I feel like re-opening a closed tab fails more than it works.

Also sometimes the back button will just freeze or not take you back. So I try hitting it again, it takes me 2 steps back in my history (this is fine), then I press forward and it takes me to the end of history, so I hit back again and it takes me 2 steps back. And the page I actually wanted to go back to is just gone from my history. I know there's a lot of whacky JS messing with history that happens on web apps, but it will often happen on HN when the article I clicked on is a plain text blog with minimal JS and definitely not altering the history state.

Edit: This literally just happened to me after writing this comment, with the post about turso database. I clicked the HN comments, clicked the post link (to github), read for a bit and clicked back. And the comments page is just not in my history.

radicality2mo ago

I also don’t understand the back button at all on Safari iOS, I think one version it just stopped doing its one task correctly. It’s messing with my mental model of how I arrived at each tab. Currently:

Safari iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. The Back button should be grayed out and isn’t, and clicking it closes the tab.

Chrome iOS: Be on a page, tap hold a link, click Open in new tab, go to new tab. Back button correctly grayed out as the tab has nowhere to go back to.

kalleboo2mo ago

macOS Safari also has fun tab bugs.

If you have a window with only one tab in it, and drag that tab to another window to merge them, the window disappears and they merge... right? Nope, if you look in your Windows menu, you now have a phantom window with no tabs in it that you have to reveal and close manually.

Randomly when I go to close a tab it will say "you have 2 tabs selected, do you want to close both". I didn't even know selecting multiple tabs was a feature, so OK maybe I had held down shift while switching tabs at some point? Nope, switching tabs (to deselect any tabs) doesn't change it, it still thinks I have some phantom tab selected somewhere.

These have both been there for years.

concinds2mo ago

Yep.

And there are even more macOS Safari bugs. One is that history search won't work; you'll can type in the search bar but it won't filter the list. At least a few years old. Another bug I've been getting for a few years is that sometimes I'll launch Safari and some tabs will be blanked out, often pinned tabs. No URL in the bar, no back button, the site is just gone and only a blank tab remains.

Another one is text input. Type a long enough piece of text in a website's text box and eventually it'll get messed up, or your text will be partly duplicated, or the box will be half-broken and you need to copy your text, refresh the page and paste it back before continuing.

Bookmarks sync is still an unreliable train wreck. Sometimes they'll be moved out of folders and into the bookmarks menu. Sometimes they're gone and you've lost them, which has never happened in any other browser.

And of course, Safari is the only modern browser where I still get infrequent browser crashes (not tab crashes). Something rarer on Chrome and Firefox than a lottery win.

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