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Level 1

5 points

Major bug in Safari 6: previous domain persists in URL bar when clicking a link

I've noticed an extremely weird and significant bug in Safari 6 / Mountain Lion:

When I'm navigating through a site, sometimes when clicking a link, Safari tries to open the corresponding URL on a previously visited site's domain instead of the current site.

For example:

First, I'm surfing on apple.com. Then, I navigate to another site, say estibot.com. On estibot.com, I click on a link that should take me to:

http://www.estibot.com/tools.html

Instead, safari takes me to http://www.apple.com/tools.html, which of course produces a 'not found' error. Nothing wrong with the link; this is purely Safari's doing.

This happens often, and apparently can happen with any site.

In other words, the domain name of a previously visited site persists in the URL, and the page that I'm trying to navigate to is added to the domain of the PREVIOUS site, not the actual site I'm using.

This is a major bug and is often rendering Safari useless for my workflow. How could a bug like this end up in the finished product?

Cheers

Esa

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion

Posted on Aug 18, 2012 11:51 AM

19 replies

Sep 18, 2012 9:01 AM in response to estibot

This has been infuriating me for a couple of weeks now as the problem occurs accross a 2011 i7 imac I use, a 21.5" i5 imac & a macbook air 2011 i5 all running Lion - Safari is essential for me as the reading list integration with my iphone is used every day across all machines...

No answer from Apple as yet so the best thing for me to do is downgrade until they fix this quite serious bug. I found this link: http://steevepatrick.com/#how_to_uninstall_safari_6_lion which will download the official Safari 6 beta version unistaller that was released for developers to play with Safari 6 before its release. This package installer will helpfully remove 6 and reinstall 5.1.7 with a few easy clicks.

You can seemingly do this through terminal and a downloaded copy of 5.1.7 but this way is whole lot easier! I hope it's of use to some of you...

Owen

ljoramo

Level 1

0 points

Sep 18, 2012 12:45 PM in response to estibot

I have this problem too, and I am a web developer and systems admin.

I have tired changing DNS servers, disabling Safari Extensions, clearing the cache, etc without solving the problem.

I used some networking tools, and it appears that Safari is requesting the wrong domains, and nothing to do with DNS.

The problem usually have a javascript attached to them. Plain anchor tags such as <a href="http://example.com/page"> do not seem affected. But anchor tags that are controled by javascripts seem to have the problem.

Could the problem have to do with javascripts that rewrite the url or the browser history?

ljoramo

Level 1

0 points

Sep 21, 2012 12:03 PM in response to estibot

It looks like the new Safari 6.0.1 update has fixed this issue for me. Since the issue was not 100% reproducible, I am not sure it is gone, but it is very encouraging so far.

luchoh

Level 1

0 points

Oct 20, 2012 3:33 PM in response to ljoramo

No, it is not fixed with 6.0.1.

Welcome to the Microsoft world! We are all beta testers now. Google at least had the decency to call GMail beta for 5 years...

Major bug in Safari 6: previous domain persists in URL bar when clicking a link