Safari 3 is awesome. It’s really fast, it finally got decent debugging tools, and it just feels so native in ways no other browser on OS X does. But all is not well. Safari 3 is one hungry hound for cookies!
Every time Safari crashes and burns, which is a surprisingly frequent occurrence when Flash or a media player is involved, it decides to take all my cookies with it and munch away. That’s pretty effin’ annoying.
It means logging in to a ton of sites that already had the “remember me” setting put. It often even means requesting a new security token from Chase Bank before I can see my statement. It just blows.
So please Safari team, can we get the cookie lust under control? Of course, it would be even better if Safari didn’t go down as much, but I recognize that media players and flash can make that hard (Firefox often goes down on the same counts, but leaves the cookies alone).
Josh
on 03 Mar 08“Safari why must you be such a cookie monster?” would have been a funnier title.
(Totally useless comment, but that was the first thing that popped into my head. That said, I’m not a Safari user - or a Mac user - but Firefox 2.0.0.12 seems to do the same thing to me in Windows, though not after every crash, and sometimes without a crash as impetus. Completely at random, my cookies seem to get eaten fairly often.)
mastsarg
on 03 Mar 08Man, I couldn’t agree more!!! THis has happened to me several times, and using 1 password is a bunch of junk as well. Please fix this Apple.
Kevin
on 03 Mar 08I’m experiencing this too, except it seems to happen randomly and not just after a crash. Very annoying.
mezza
on 03 Mar 08That’s weird. I’ve not had that issue at all. Leopard upgrade or clean install? If you’re going to trust cookies though, you might as well trust the keychain, so that in case of cookie loss you can login easily.
Personally, I would NEVER use a banking service that relies upon a cookie.
Kelli
on 03 Mar 08Oddly, I’ve never experienced this in Safari, but like Josh, FireFox does it to me quite often after a crash (or not). Not every crash, but enough for it to be extremely annoying.
Me want cookie! nom! nom! nom! nom! nom!
Evan
on 03 Mar 08Actually, like you alluded to – could we instead just get a better authentication system for Chase bank?
Most people who know a thing about browsing clear their cookies once in awhile on purpose, and it’d be nice if my banking site didn’t suffer total amnesia when I do that.
Colin
on 03 Mar 08Happens to me every few days. VERY annoying. When I switched from Windows and IE a year ago I figured I had seen the end of that problem, but Safari 3 seems to have the same issue.
McScreedle
on 03 Mar 08Safari just suddenly stopped working on both of my laptops (both running XP).
Windows conspiracy or Apple Screwup?
You decide!
Tim
on 03 Mar 08+1
I second the motion that Safari, yet great in looks, crashes waaaaaaaaaay to much.
I’m running nightly builds of 3.1 as well to see if it is getting better and it seems to still crash as much :(
Tim P.S. What’s up with file uploads with Safari. It always seems to hang for me.
Nate Bird
on 03 Mar 08I find this especially funny since Apple’s Hot News just posted this headline, “Macworld’s advice: Use Safari”
Link: http://www.macworld.com/article/132311/2008/03/safari3.html
Chris Stout
on 03 Mar 08I’ve found that clicking the “Try Again” button on the “Oops, I’ve Crashed” dialog box tends to destroy my cookies as well as all of my browser settings. Closing out of that dialog box and relaunching Safari from the dock seems to be safer cookie-wise. I’ve had ample opportunity to test this theory, as it crashes on me a good three to five times a day.
I want my slow-but-reliable Safari 2.x back!
Mike
on 03 Mar 08@ mezza and Evan
Chase is my bank as well and I wipe out my cookies a couple times a week and never get a new security token request from Chase. It is only when I am using a different machine do I have to go thru the process. I have no idea where the token is getting written to on my machine, but it isn’t with a cookie. ING Direct and Vanguard do the same thing.
Chris Vincent
on 03 Mar 08My Safari (3.0.4 on Tiger) likes to crash when I close a window or tab that is still loading. Happens all the time when eliminating pop-unders that manage to squirm through the pop-up blocker.
Brian Stucki
on 03 Mar 08I’ve had the cookies missing about once a week and it’s incredibly annoying. I’m glad I’m not the only one.
I’ve resorted to keeping a copy of CookieThied on my machine. It’s real purpose is to keep the cookies in sync between Safari and Camino. But since you can transfer both ways, I’ve found it to be an incredibly good backup and restore for cookies.
http://pimpmycamino.com/parts/cookiethief
RSS
on 03 Mar 08Why must SVN be such a RSS monster and send this entry out twice?
James
on 03 Mar 08I find this very strange. My Safari (3.0.4) on a MacBook (OS X 10.4 Tiger, 2 GB RAM) never crashes – even when I had 10 videos loading and at least a dozen other tabs open. I’ve never lost cookies.
Sam Brown
on 03 Mar 08I’ve been raving and rating about the cookie eating problem for Months, and without a hint from Apple that there is even a problem.
No crashes, just cookie wipeouts. Nightmare.
some guy
on 03 Mar 08Hm, Firefox 2 on Windows rarely crashes for me, and I consume plenty of Flash content/other multimedia.
GeeIWonder
on 03 Mar 08This does not compute.
brad
on 03 Mar 08I too have never had a Safari 3 crash under Tiger; maybe it’s a Leopard problem.
Here’s one place where IE shines over Safari: in IE, you have options to export your cookies as well as your bookmarks. I use that feature to create backups of my cookies in case something like this happens. But there’s no such option for Safari that I can tell—you can export your bookmarks but not cookies. I don’t even know where my cookies are stored; I assumed they’d be in the Safari folder of my library, but no…it turns out they are in a separate folder all by themselves called Cookies.
The good news is that if you keep your home folder backed up, you can recover the cookies from there.
Carl Lerche
on 03 Mar 08“it finally got decent debugging tools”
How do you debug javascript? I haven’t been able to get drosera to work with Safari 3. It always complains about not finding webkit.
Ricky Irvine
on 03 Mar 08All this time I thought it was a new Leopard ‘security feature’.
Sebhelyesfarku
on 03 Mar 08Safari is a piece of shit.
Ricky Irvine
on 03 Mar 08I recently switched back to Safari from Camino because it is so sweet. No shit!
John
on 03 Mar 08Another Safari 3 on Tiger user. While I can’t say it has never crashed, it is very rare occurrence. And when it does, it has never ate my cookies.
Sam
on 03 Mar 08Strange to hear that Safari is crashing so frequently and so destructively for so many of you. It very rarely crashes for me, and the few times it has, it hasn’t chewed up my cookies. I’ve never had my cookies eaten up at all, actually.
I wonder what we’re doing differently. Are you running any plugins? I have Saft installed as an input manger, but nothing else. I’m running Safari 3.0.4 on Leopard 10.5.2 currently, but none of the earlier versions have caused problems for me, either.
I’m not disputing that you’re all experiencing crashes, just offering a point of comparison to help identify the hiccup.
carlivar
on 03 Mar 08Hmm I used to have this exact cookie monster problem with Safari, but all has been quiet since a recent Leopard upgrade… or Software Update of some sort at least.
Erik J. Barzeski
on 03 Mar 08I don’t believe it’s necessarily related to crashing. Safari deleting your cookie file has long been a known issue on Intel Macs.
http://nslog.com/2007/12/11/safari_cookie_bug
Bob
on 03 Mar 08Slightly OT but do any of you get annoyed by the way Safari refreshes the page on a back button press? For example when clicking through to a photo on Flickr’s 7 days interesting page, then clicking back the page refreshes, losing the original images and selecting a new random set.
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
Can you change this?
Thanks
Bob
Dan
on 03 Mar 08Chase Bank needs a new login, badly.
Jim Jeffers
on 03 Mar 08Don’t hold your breath. That sounds like an upgrade that we won’t see until Safari 4 emerges alongside the announcement of another big cat. ;)
Gavin Laking
on 03 Mar 08Have you tried the Webkit nightlies? All the Safari goodness on the bleeding edge of development. I’ve been using them for general browsing for the last month and haven’t noticed any nasties after crashing; saying that though I’ve only had Safari/Webkit crash out a couple of times. Perhaps I’m not giving it the hammering that I should…
http://nightly.webkit.org/
GeeIWonder
on 03 Mar 08Very topical:
“PayPal to Safari users: ‘Ditch it’”
Awesome indeed.
Androse Rosewood
on 03 Mar 08“Me too”.
It’s quite sad that I’ve come to accept the fact that my web browser will just crash sometimes. If another application like, say, Textmate, crashed half as much, I’d ban it from my hard drive forever.
Dudu P
on 04 Mar 08Wow, finally someone solved the riddle. It happened to me a lot of times, and I never figured out the relation between those crashes and the re-logging on my favorite sites again.
The crashes only happen when loading the Flash Player, which is really crappy as hell since version 9.
Julian
on 04 Mar 08I have a feeling the issue you’re talking might be less related to Safari crashing, and more to do with an annoying bug that tends to pop up when you use certain sites, Apple’s bug reporter for one:
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/apple/apple_hates_bug_filers.php
Although it’s certainly annoying, you can mitigate it’s evil to some degree by duplicating your cookies file every so often, so if Safari nukes it, you’ve got a backup right there.
Manuel Martensen
on 04 Mar 08I clean my Safari cache almost every hour when i am surfing or working on a site, seems that this does the trick for me. No crashing here.
Zach Koch
on 04 Mar 08Safari 3 crashes all the time. I switched to Camino recently and have been really happy with it.
Eric
on 04 Mar 08By turning off caching and auto fill for “other” forms Safari has been pretty much entirely crash free for me.
I did have my cookies get deleted once, but a quck trip to Time Machine to restore ~/Library/Cookies/Cookies.plist fixed that.
Alper
on 04 Mar 08It doesn’t only happen when it crashes (which is often enough), but also in the middle of a browsing session. This cookie Korsakoff really must stop.
And it happens in the nightlies too, which is bad enough but gives us an excuse to call it in as a bug on the tracker.
John Topley
on 04 Mar 08Safari 3 used to crash quite a lot for me on 10.4.11, but has been rock-solid since I upgraded to Leopard and I’ve never had my cookies munched. Clearly YMMV.
Doug
on 04 Mar 08I’ve had Safari crash now and then but it’s never taken out my cookies in the process.
You mentioned more frequent crashes on pages with Flash and Mike mentioned clearing cookies but Chase bank still recognizing him. Chase does that by using Flash cookies. More and more sites do because so many people clear their cookies. Could it be only related to sites that use Flash cookies?
I turned off my Flash cookies long ago and that could be why I don’t have the cookie problem. I also use Chase but I think they try Flash cookies first then fall back to normal cookies if that fails.
I’d try a few things: 1) rebuild OS X permissions, 2) install a fresh copy of the latest Flash, 3) try turning off Flash cookies. You can control-click on any Flash movie in the browser to get to the settings.
elliottcable
on 04 Mar 08So seriously agreed.
So much better than Firefox for daily browsing… but in my testing, Firefox has much better support for unusual/advanced javascript and SVG rendering. And of course, this crashing issue.
However, the speed and support for @font-face still keep Webkit Nightlies as my main browser of choice (-:
Steve Bissonnette
on 04 Mar 08Ran into this also. “Time Machine” quickly and painlessly restored my cookies file.
Justin Reese
on 04 Mar 08@GeelWonder: Terrific selective editing. He stated precisely why it was awesome, and precisely in what way it wasn’t. Base jumping can kill you, but is still awesome. (As a scientist, I’m sure you can find empirical evidence of base jumping’s awesomeness in a journal article somewhere.)
AnkurJ
on 04 Mar 08I use 1Passwd. Login’s don’t concern me. =) Just a quick ‘Apple’ key+’\’ and I’m logged in. http://1passwd.com/
GeeIWonder
on 04 Mar 08@Justin—Thanks. I guess my definition of awesome software is somewhat like my definition of an awesome airplane or awesome driver. That is to say, at the very least it doesn’t crash, and certainly not surprising often.
It doesn’t matter what kind of upholstery your car has if you’re always at risk of neck injury. People who routinely use web apps should be more concerned about browser crashes than most.
I’m not sure where the base jumping or journals comes into it, but I’ll assume that’s a chip on a different shoulder. As far as ad hominem attacks go, ‘scientist’ doesn’t bother me.
Justin Reese
on 04 Mar 08@Geel: You might have taken my comment more personally than I intended. I was jokingly referencing your comment in another thread - I’m not stalking, I just happened to read both threads in sequence - about being a scientist.
I guess I fully understand how something can be awesome without being perfect. (Or, to be more faithful to David’s original comments, it can be awesome except for particular shortcomings.) Homonyms aside, crashing a plane is very different from crashing a browser, especially if that browser does something so much better than a less crash-happy browser, that it’s worth the price of admission. In this case, it seems Safari’s rendering abilities and “Mac-like-ness” are worth the instability—an instability, I should note, that I don’t experience personally. No amount of excellent service or on-flight amenities would make up for a crashed plane.
GeeIWonder
on 04 Mar 08Yeah, I agree. Different users, different needs. No big deal if you’re favorite toy crashes once and awhile. If you use your browser in more mission-critical contexts though (and many, especially 37signals types, do) then crashes are no good.
Ultimately, the balance is up to the user. To me, stability is a major issue and outranks the stuff like the phishing and security certificates (that Paypal seems so worried about), which outranks the cookie annoyances which outranks minor differences in presentation and rendering of standards-based markup languages. But that’s me, and I think my point was phrased in a way that sort of reflects that.
Also, I don’t need journals to know base jumping is awesome. ;)
GeeIWonder
on 04 Mar 08A related note (esp. with Safari now on other platforms) is how well your OS can handle/isolate a single app going down.
This discussion is closed.