Comments on: iPhone Safari Crash Fix

By: bhyslop

bhyslop — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:15:58 +0000

What makes this even more fun and pernicious is that ATT choices and network loading can have an impact on whether a crash can happen. Safari rendering bravely starts even before all page elements are loaded. That means I will start scrolling to the place on the page where I was before the last crash before all the packets are in. More conjecture but that could make the interleave of packets and display elements even worse. If the local cellular link is trickling instead of bursting packets, that also could make it worse. I suspect some pages are worse than others for me in terms of crashiness. I also suspect people at different locations have different results with the same page. The 2.2 release has this cute safari website critique debug feature where it tells you all the problems on the web page- this tells me the management is working on this problem but in completely the wrong way, spending half a million dollars to build an application level blame snow fence against ‘bad’ web pages when the memory management subsystem is not in order. and maybe I’m too harsh since full MMU hardware may not be available and they’re just muddling through with immature models. They really ought to be separating the memory pools for incoming data, outgoing data, and visual elements but instead they’re probably having days of meetings where completely irrelevant but much less scary tweaks are loudly argued… It’s what happens when the B team is brought in to maintain something they can’t admit to their management they don’t understand (or more likely they just don’t have the scope to do a quadruple bypass to a different allocation system- everything would need retesting!). Such is life in the software engineering trenches.

Ok my rant is done. I am resigned to crashing safari ten times a day (it is definitely that often) and I’m not optimistic that even 3.0 will fix this since cultures tend to persist. My ATT contract ends in a year and the hungry people at google may have a better offering by then. {shrug}

By: bhyslop

bhyslop — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 11:39:28 +0000

I am a heavy iPhone user and safari is an extremely crashy browser even in the 2.2 release. As a software engineer I’ve worked for over a decade in the embedded space, some of that in mobile phones. I find that I can guess when safari is about to crash based on the browsing getting sluggish in a particular couple of ways. First, the responsiveness to a drag operation lags, and second rerendering previously hidden real estate also starts to lag. This can happen with evn a single page load since safari launch.

Enough with facts; the following conjectures are more fun. I think the apple people have not invested well enough in mobile memory management. They’re so new to the mobile space they may still be using heaps instead of partition pools. In a nutshell heaps let you use every last erg of memory but it can get fragmented like a disk drive as blocks are reallocated and reallocated. The OS starts to spend lots of time traversing the list of oddly sized free blocks to find one than can fit a current request. Imagine if a particular memory allocation pattern allocates 16 bytes every 1 kilobyte in a megabyte pool: though the memory is over 99% free you can never allocate 2K: this can happen say if a given heap stores web page features and network packets- network packets are freed relatively quickly after traversing the ip stack while visual elements persist for longer. That precrash lag I sense could be ever increasing linear searches of free lists until some deeper service deems the app is no longer stable (or more likely the critical allocation of a drawing context fails).

By: Aden

Aden — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:30:13 +0000

My safari is crashing when ever l try to visit website any sagetion pls

By: Dylan

Dylan — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:03:33 +0000

This has been an issue since I first got me 3g iPhone. It seems that image-intensive sites are the main problem, constantly making my whole phone crash, not just safari! I am on 2.2 and it’s a little better. On 2.1 my screen was freezing and I couldn’t even turn the phone off!

By: henry bnry.lince

henry bnry.lince — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:04:55 +0000

“safari is the best browser I’ve used but it crashes periodically”. Are you some kind of idiot?

By: Theaterthug

Theaterthug — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:18:01 +0000

I have to 2.2 update and my iPod have crashed like 10 times today and every day

By: bryan

bryan — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:44:05 +0000

I also still found crashes but much less now. At least it almost won’t crashed now when I zooming in and out to surf the web, or loading large e-mails. But it’s memory management might be quite a problem. I still got idle when I hearing music and surf the web the same time….
And, yes, just like Paul said, I am not confidence to highly recommand Apple product now.
And I’m also look for the missing copy function. My previous phone from Motorola, linux based, restart once every 1 or 2 month. Stable!! And, can copy and paste!

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 21:16:21 +0000

I have updated to 2.2, and safari still crashes fairly often, along with other apps. To be fair, my phone is jailbroken and unlocked, so I don’t know what affect that has on speed and stability of the phone. Just thought I’d add my 2 cents.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:08:17 +0000

Well, I’m happy to hear that 2.2 solved the crashing problem for some of you but it most certainly has not done anything on my 3g iPhone. I get at least a dozen crashes a day and that is after restarting, clearing the cache/history and doing restore through iTunes.

I have owned Apple computers since 1988 with my first Mac SE and I have to say that I am getting disgusted with Apple. From the nonsense with my Time Capsule failing to perform backups properly to iTunes freezing to this BS with my phone, I am at my wits end. Frankly, for the first time in 20 years I no longer recommend Apple products to my PC using friends.

By: Klaus Kjeldsen

Klaus Kjeldsen — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:36:11 +0000

The improved stability and performance of Safari in version 2.2 seems to have fixed the crashing issue. No crashes so fare... lovely!

By: Safari 2.2

Safari 2.2 — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 17:04:21 +0000

If You haven’t updated to the latest 2.2 firmware I suggest you try it .i have yet to crash the new browser. I have 8 windows open and have visited all the usual suspect pages and I annoy crash this thing. I mean aside from visiting flash sites which the iphone clearly does not support, this new update is performing phenomenally. In fact I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed after typing all of this. It used to be that I couldn’t even surf for 5 mind without encountering a page that would go belly up. I’ve been able to surf for hours straight and this is with caches fullly loaded! Definitely something to call home about. Now let’s see if I can post all of this without it crashing. Remember still no copy and paste. Wish me luck.

By: raymond

raymond — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:12:23 +0000

WTF apple I want my refund.. Safari crashes all the f@c$I!g time. Never had this problem before the 2.0 update.

By: larry

larry — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 04:57:37 +0000

The Safari browser was more stable – by about a factor of 10 – when we were still at version 1.0 (i.e. Summer / Fall 2007).

Apple will never admit it, but something has gone screwy with the browser and the 2.0 update they released alongisde the 3g. It is a pain in the ass to browse with the phone now. We have this amazingly full-featured browser that crashes every 10 minutes.

Fantastic.

By: bryan

bryan — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:43:24 +0000

I’m a little fans of Apple for 20 years but I’m quite really frustrated for this. My safari crash even browsing only one single page! And, in general, over 10 crashes a day! Hope Apple can fix this ASAP so that it can really be the best PDA media centre phone …etc.