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Posted By: dkmarsh Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/12/10 11:06 AM

I've encountered a bug in Safari 5's View menu-> Customize Toolbar... sheet, involving Safari Extensions which place buttons in the toolbar, which is for me 100% reproducible. Here's what happens:
  1. An extension which places a button in the toolbar is installed and enabled. (So far, I've tried SnapBack, AdBlock for Safari, and Safari Reload Button.)
  2. From Safari's View menu, I choose Customize Toolbar....
  3. The Customize Toolbar... sheet appears, containing the usual array of icons, plus the icon of the extension in question.
  4. As soon as I move the cursor into the sheet, the beachball appears.
  5. Shortly thereafter (about ten seconds?), Safari quits.
  6. On relaunch, Safari appears to be running successfully, but my home page (Google) will not load.
  7. A subsequent quit and relaunch restores normal behavior.
The crash occurs whether the extension's icon is currently in the toolbar or not, as long as the extension is enabled. (I have yet to experiment with multiple extensions enabled.) When no extensions are enabled, the Customize Toolbar... sheet behaves as expected.

Interestingly, I note that when an extension is enabled, not only does it appear in the Customize Toolbar... sheet as an individual icon, but it's also included in the "default set" at the bottom of the sheet. (I can hardly wait to see what that default set looks like when multiple extensions are enabled.)

I'm running Safari 5.0 (5533.16) in OS X 10.5.8 on a PPC Mac mini. Anyone else able to confirm or deny this bug?
Posted By: jchuzi Re: Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/12/10 11:20 AM
It doesn't happen for me with Safari 5.0 (6533.16) in 10.6.3. Have you tried anything in the Reset Safari options? Does it happen in a different account?

Addendum: The only extension that I have is SnapBack. It appears in the default set, as you describe.
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/12/10 11:38 AM

Of further interest:

As one might guess, when multiple extensions are enabled, all of them appear in the "default set."

The cursor need not be moved into the sheet in order to invoke the spinning beachball; there's just a few seconds' delay between the appearance of the sheet and the appearance of the beachball.

If, upon the first relaunch following the crash—the relaunch in which Google fails to load—I choose Customize Toolbar..., no extensions appear and there is no crash. (This is presumably because Safari is relaunched with the previous prefs, the crash having prevented the new (enabled) state of the extension(s) from being written to the relevant plist.) If I now dismiss the sheet by clicking Done...

...Google loads!

Edit: the loading of Google following the dismissal of the sheet turns out to be coincidental. Further investigation confirms that Google will eventually load on that first relauch all by itself; it just takes twenty seconds or so.
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/12/10 12:06 PM

Restting Safari has no effect. And the issue occurs in a plain vanilla test account as well. My hunch is that this is a PPC issue; I can't imagine Apple devoted a lot of debugging time to a platform which was discontinued four years ago.

Hopefully someone running Leopard on Intel will be able to help me narrow the diagnostic focus one way or the other.
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/12/10 12:28 PM

Further research suggests the issue is OS- rather than hardware-dependent: Safari 5 Crashes - Toolbar.

If so, it's a bit more disturbing that this bug wasn't picked up in testing, since those running 10.5.8 are less than nine months out of date. tongue
Originally Posted By: dkmarsh
Anyone else able to confirm or deny this bug?

Still interested in how this plays out on (for example) a G5 iMac running 10.5.8? shocked
[I do take your word for it... wink ]
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/12/10 06:19 PM

Quote:
Still interested..?

Mais oui. smile
I can confirm your observations after installing AutoPagerize followed by Safari Reload Button, and add the following.

Once Safari crashes when the 'Customize Toolbar...' sheet is opened, any installed button extensions disappear from this sheet and the 'Extensions' pane of Safari prefs; however, they remain present in /Users/Username/Library/Safari/Extensions.
Non-button extensions, like AutoPagerize and SafariRestore, are still present (in Safari Prefs) and don't seem to cause the same issue.

As to your question about a single extension vs. multiple ones, it seems that just one button extension can trigger this bug, while the presence of one or more active non-button extensions doesn't seem to matter.
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/13/10 12:56 AM

Quote:
Once Safari crashes when the 'Customize Toolbar...' sheet is opened, any installed button extensions disappear from this sheet and the 'Extensions' pane of Safari prefs...

I'm not finding this to be the case. That is, the extensions disappear from the sheet, but they don't disappear from the Extensions prefpane. Could it be that you never successfully quit Safari after installing them? If my hypothesis is correct, a crash in such a circumstance would wipe out any knowledge Safari has of the extensions' existence—because, as I speculated above, the relevant plist was never updated due to the absence of a normal Quit event.

If, OTOH, Safari has a chance to quit normally following the installation of one or more such extensions, the plist in question is updated as expected, and subsequent crashes don't cause this Safari amnesia.

Clearly some more testing is in order! laugh
Posted By: dkmarsh Re: Safari Extensions Bug (PPC/OS X 10.5.8) - 06/13/10 01:12 AM

I uninstalled all three extensions (AdBlock, SnapBack, and Reload Button)—watching them disappear from ~/Library/Safari/Extensions/—and redownloaded them to test my hypothesis. After installing all three, I went immediately to Customize Toolbar..., and Safari crashed as expected. Upon relaunch, alas, all three appeared in the Extensions prefpane. I wonder if they're cached somewhere?

Maybe I'll just wait for Safari 5.0 v 1.1 for Leopard, or whatever terminological sleight of hand Apple uses to pretend a quick turnaround patch is instead some vaguely defined "performance improvement." wink
Originally Posted By: dkmarsh
Could it be that you never successfully quit Safari after installing them?

You're absolutely correct: I went directly from installing the extensions to the 'Customize Toolbar...' sheet, whereupon Safari crashed; I did not quit and reload Safari after the extension installation.

But again, the ensuing amnesia only affected the button extensions; non-button extensions were still listed in Safari prefs' Extensions tab. tongue
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