Apple Safari Crashes For iOS and Mac Users

Users of Apple’s Safari browser have had a bad week. First, a prank site called ‘crashsafari.com’ caused the browser to stop working and now many people are unable to use it all.

Users on multiple versions of iOS and Mac OS X are reporting that the browser crashes simply by tapping or clicking the address bar.

Because of today, most users are going to have switched Safari Suggestions off. Few will re-enable, too. iOS 10 will have to force-enable ?

— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) January 27, 2016

Safari crashes

It has been suggested that the bug is being caused by ‘Safari Suggestions’ – a feature which autocompletes searches, suggests links and other information as you type. A potential fix is to disable the feature, or use Safari in ‘private mode’, which doesn’t send typing data to the server.

Apple told TechWeekEurope the issue has now been resolved. However those affected by the bug might have certain data stored in their cache. This should be emptied automatically after an hour or two, but if Safari is still crashing, users should clear the cache manually.

Crashsafari.com was clicked on more than 100,000 times by Monday afternoon, and also affected Chrome and Firefox browsers. While desktop users simply had to restart their browser, On iPhone, the URL opened a page of self-generating text that eventually forced the device to restart, heating it up in the process due to the intense processor work going on in the background.

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