Q: iPad Safari crashing regularly

You guys are waaaaaaay too nice to Mr. Brown.

Same with me and my iPad 1 which I've had since the day they were released.  Never had Safari just close out to the home screen until iOS5 was installed. Nothing has changed with my web browsing patterns either.

iOS5 = Problems

Bob H

Hey Dwight,

Even though I agree with a lot of you what you said, calling users cry baby because safari will hard crash when you click on a link is not acceptable.

I sure hope you don't work for apple, it would denote a shift in mentality in the company (or at least, from how I perceive it).

Not putting the blame of an engineering issue on the user is one if the reason I value apple products and why I have a hard time in the "clever" engineering community.

Some text can be href'd, making it impossible to know beforehand if the site is on the blacklist.

Also, feel free to maintain and remember a device specific blacklist of sites and refraining yourself from visiting it on your ipad.

That's just not the kind of perspective that makes me an apple customer. I'd rather save a few hundred bucks and get a xoom if that were the case.

Let's not even mention that Safari Mobile would never have been through the AppStore's approval process hadn't it been shipped with the iPad.

Seriously. Hit a google plus page and down goes Safari.

I do understand that Safari Mobile is an incredible piece of engineering, I am being grateful to Apple for creatign a whole new world of computing (and as a side effect, help create my job/title since I'm writing iOS apps for a living).

But.

iOS 5 should NEVER have been released as is. I'm utterly convinced that they've run into serious delays and shipped it anyway because they had iPhones sitting in a warehouse waiting for their OS to get shipped and sold for holiday season.

The battery bug 5.0 shipped with is not acceptable by Apple standards. Nor is the fix in 5.0.1 that didn't fully solve it.

Taking gestures away from iPad1? What the ****?!? Fortunately, they backed on this one.

Yes, I understand the changes in iOS5 are huge. I'm impressed with iCloud, applauding some API changes. LLVM is a major contribution to the development world, ARC is a very nice to have chopping of a lot of uneeded code and freeing up developer mind for more business oriented tasks, etc etc, I won't go over all the new features, there are too many of them.

But a lot of these have fundamental implementation issues that make them not reliable enough.

I've had issues with ARC not nilling weak references, forcing me to nil them on dealloc (which is kind of defeating the purpose, ain't it?), blocks are sometimes not copied, to a point where I seriously considered de-arcifing a whole project.

I've had LLVM generate just plain wrong code for ARMv6 (aka iphone 3g), took me 2 days to (luckily) work around the issue.

XCode is fixing tons of bugs just to introduce some even bigger every release - and I still love the tool and is on my favorite IDEs shortlist, but seriously, randomly loosing references to IBOutlets in IB? They managed to release that?!?

Safari is just nor working. This app shouldn't be approved by the app store, it infringes a basic AppStore rule: your app must not crash. Specially when it's the second most used app on the iPad, after Mail.

What also amazes me is that the tech news sphere has been pouring megabytes of text on Jobs' "hold it differently" that was basically a non issue, but doesn't even report anything about the main iPad app being disfunctional.

Skybert 69,

Your choices are at no cost. Wants aplenty. If it were that easy, I'm sure Apple would have met your requirements like yesterday.

Frankly, I have no idea what Apple's costs might be for the alternatives you present but I suspect they are of substance. Server time is both scheduled and expensive. Software people have long queues, too.

Costs aside, I feel certain nobody in Apple wants this burden leveled on the shoulders of its customers any longer than necessary. Likely, most of Apple's experts are just getting back from their holiday vacations and are just now getting a leg up again.

Maybe we should have taken a vacation, too?

I'm reading words in this larger discussion like "episodic." However, I'm presently using my iPad with the latest OS installed without too much difficulty. Sure, I've been frustrated with my Pulse News reader crashing from time to time but I've learned why by now.

If your troubles are actually in the episodic range, then I suggest you get a leg of your own up by checking the signal to noise ratio on your home network. Your "episodic" adventure could be caused by your neighbors' network interferences, or some such. The iStumbler app on a notebook or desktop computer might be of help to you here.

My crash data suggests, roughly,that crashes are caused by low memory issues two out of three times over the life of my iPad. This sort of crash happens when you go to a web site where there are coding problems galore, ones that Apple never intended you try to go to with an iPad in the first place. Can't you accept the fact that you're using an iPad and not a notebook or desktop computer and start learning where you might go without suffering yet another crash? (Apple is well known for saying "no" to a lot of technology, like Flash, for example.)

If I experienced "episodic" circumstances with my iPad, I'd likely be as upset as you seem to be.

The Safari crashes aren't caused by WiFi problems or web sites that contain errors (in any event Web site errors should never cause browser crashes). There is no way that you can blame the user for having visited "incorrect" websites and "causing" the problems. That is just ridiculous. The Safari crashes are generally address limits violation errors. These sorts of errors usually indicate a memory management issue (using bad pointers or pointers to memory which has been released, etc.).

The situation is quite simple: Apple introduced some stability problems in the iOS 5/5.0.1 Safari browser (or Webkit). It's up to Apple to fix these problems and I'm sure that they are working on this.

After restoring my iPad 1 to factory defaults from scratch, resinstalling all data and media content via iCloud, reinstalling Apps from scratch and manually reorganizing pages and folders, I successfully used my device for a couple of weeks. However, after posting an update about my initial success to this forum on January 3, my iPad started crashing again (though not nearly as often as in early December).

Most of the crashes appear to be JavaScript errors from ads on Web pages.

I began to wonder why my iPad 1 crashes, but my significant other's similalry configured iPad 1 doesn't (nor do our two iPhone 4 handsets running iOS 5.0.1). About the only differences I've been able to uncover between the two is that her iPad is configured with Photo Stream and iCloud Backup set to "Off" while mine are "On." Also, I have many (many) more Bookmarks added to my Safari Bookmark bar. This might explain why my iPad seems slow, and maybe it is contributing to memory problems too...

So, I'm now experimenting by turning off iCloud syncing for Bookmarks, Photo Stream and iCloud Backup (in Settings>iCloud...) and contemplating other solutions. I've had some success in that the Safari crashes don't seem to be coming as often...

I also had three other thoughts.

1. Many iPad Debug Consoles have reported countless JavaScript errors, and these are one possible cause for all the iPad iOS 5x crashes. With Lion, I believe Apple finally dropped support for Java, supposedly turning this over to Oracle (the new owner after acquring Sun Microsystems). Of course, Java and JavaScript are similar, but different. According to www.htmlgoodies.com:

"...Java is an Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language created by...Sun Microsystems. JavaScript is a scripting language that was created by...Netscape and was originally known as LiveScript. JavaScript is a (very) distant cousin of Java in that it is also an OOP language. Many of their programming structures are similar. However, JavaScript contains a much smaller and simpler set of commands than does Java..."

So, I wonder who's supporting JavaScript in Safari. I guess it must be Apple. But could the recent changes in Java support responsibilities have affected Apple's JavaScript engineering team?

2. That said, one of Apple's old tips for troubleshooting Web page loading problems in OS X Safari 3 was this (in italics, below). Could it still be relevant? Has anyone experimented with these settings in Safari for iOS 5x?

If a webpage won’t work

If some of the features of a webpage don’t work, such as audio or animation, you’ll see boxes with question marks here and there on the page. You may have turned off some utilities that help Safari handle special content on webpages.

To turn webpage features back on:

- Choose Safari > Preferences.

- Click Security.

- Make sure these checkboxes are selected: Enable Plug-ins, Enable Java, and Enable JavaScript.

- Make sure this checkbox is not selected: “Block pop-up windows.”

If the steps above don’t help, you may need a plug-in application, which is a small program that assists Safari and adds to its capabilities.

You can also choose Safari > “Report Bugs to Apple” to report the problem.

3. The iPad 3 will be in stores within 90 days. It's very likely that the OS and Safari engineering teams have been on deadline troubleshooting final issues for that upcoming device, in addition to busy preparing the next iOS 5x update. God forbid, but perhaps the next iPad's software and a fix for this will arrive at the same time?

While this apparent bug has lingered far too long, Apple does have a history of excellent tech support and the company does not usually leave customers hanging like this. It's been four months since information on these iPad crashes started appearing in Apple's Support discussion Forums and it seems to me that is a long time for a bug to go unresolved. There has to be an explanation for this...

First of all, forget Java.

Has nothing to do with the issues at hand.

The language isn't even remotely close to JavaScript at any level. Oracle nor sun are not involved, Java is as relevant to iOS as my dog is.

Now on to javascript.

Javascript errors in the console are meaningless.

The interpreter by design handles these. A web programmer did something wrong, the interpreter will log in the debug console and that's it.

If the browser crashes because of that, it's a bug in the interpreter. Period.

Apple is of course responsible for the JavaScript interpreter in safari (however these days, it becomes more of a full blown virtual machine with all bells and whistles, but let's not get into technical details).

It's very possible that the new JS interpreter is causing these crashes. Or not.

Or that it requires too much memory. Or not. It's really hard to tell, everything being closed.

One thing to keep in mind, it tends to happen on those large sites that make extensive bad use of javascript.

Also websites tend to serve wired versions to iPads.

On the wired site, developers got used to gigabytes of available ram, fast CPUs and insanely fast JS virtual machines.

Not going to happen on an iPad. Poor safari tries to render very complex HTML, along with megabytes of JS embedded in the page and just can't keep up.

That could also explain why safari doesn't crash on iphone4+. Devices have twice the ram and get lighter versions of websites.

GEOPIX, Inc. wrote:

 

The iPad 3 will be in stores within 90 days.

You know that how?

I have had this problem non-stop since the iOS 5 update on my iPad 1, and it seems to be worsening. It is so frustrating I could scream. It happens in Safari and any app that uses the embedded browser for content. I keep hoping a resolution will be found, but the fact that Apple has not even acknowledged the problem doesn't give me a lot of hope that one is imminent.

Hope for Saint Andrew!

Try burning another candle? Psychiatry often addresses such dilemmas, but you'd have to acknowledge something first, I suspect.

Apple has a whole lot of problems. We all do. Maybe we should have a group therapy session. Oh, that's what this is, right?

5.0.2 might come soon. It might be better than 5.0.1 but there was hope for 5.0.1, too.

Spinoza wanted to explain Nature mathematically. Maybe Apple needs to acknowledge a lack of baby powder on their slipsticks.

Error making is one of the most basic methods of scientific effort. The most common error among humans is to assume wrongly. The second most common is the selection error.

The comments are nice enough. If you believe making them helps with the hope, then I don't mind if you keep'em coming.

Dwight,

I'm sure most on this forum would accept faults and errors as part of Apple's drive for innovation for the benefit of being on the leading edge, indeed most people unconsciously sign up to this deal when buying leading edge products. However, to maintain brand loyalty and trust, Apple must keep their side of the bargain.

Acknowledging there is an issue, and that it is being addressed is all most of us need. So stop telling me I am being unreasonable by expecting a machine I spent hundreds of pounds on, to do the most fundamental task I expect of it. And least of all, there is no need to be facetious about others' perfectly reasonable customer service expectations.

Customer service 101: communicate openly with your customers. That's all we ask.

Gary

Dwight brown, your "cry baby" post is condescending at best and downright rude at worst, I can't even believe you posted that crap on here. Suggesting that we are deliberately re visiting troubled sites is nonsense, even this site causes it so maybe we shouldn't be here?? My iPad 1 was perfect before iOS 5 since then it has become unstable in all apps. It is not our fault that apple refuse to acknowledge or reply to their loyal customers, this is partly what causes so much angst and grief n forums like this one, a simple reply that a bug has been acknowledged and is being worked on would help a lot.

How many bug reports or error logs apple get is no interest of ours at all, I don't care if they get a million a day, it is their problem to reduce them by improving. I also doubt that the iPad has built in limitations to reduce its impact on other apple products, they do not have any other product similar to the iPad, the iPad is not a laptop or a desktop.

Apple needs to fix this, and soon, they cannot afford complacency in today's marketplace.

I'm off for a cry now!!

Welcome to Apple Customer Service!

What you see is what you get.

Effective communications require answers. Requisite answers require time.

Relax. Your time will come.

I don't believe Apple monitors these discussions. Instead, they rely on crash reports.

All the begging, whining, and even wheezing only allows for your self-flaggelation. Swing your whip a bit harder to feel better.

Do not send a complaint through apple's feedback form. That's for feature requests. Call tech support in your country. Take it into the geniusbar or apple authorized service provider. And please do a DFU restore. I will repeat if it doesn't work, it is likely hardware and your ipad needs to be serviced.

your ipad needs to be serviced, either that or a specific app is causing your ipad to crash, but I doubt this, because they are pretty well sandboxed.