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Re: Weird Safari/System issue
artie505 #32139 12/16/14 08:20 AM
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Given all the do-si-doing that's been going on, might it not be thought to just "retiring" Safari and using a different browser (such as Firefox)? It would certainly resolve the frustration with this issue.

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
grelber #32140 12/16/14 08:24 AM
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You never give up, do you? wink

Naaah!!! Especially not when there's maybe still something to be learned.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Weird Safari/System issue
artie505 #32142 12/16/14 11:35 AM
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Originally Posted By: artie505
I doubt that you could delete Safari, itself, without an uninstaller, and as far as I know, none exists, but deleting its "support" files, restarting, and installing a new version of Safari over your old one would be a useful exercise.

There's no standalone version of Safari that can be installed over an existing one in Mavericks. See How to install Safari 7.



dkmarsh—member, FineTunedMac Co-op Board of Directors
Re: Weird Safari/System issue
dkmarsh #32143 12/16/14 11:47 AM
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Thanks for the link.

Isn't reinstalling OS X (A clean install?) a bit of an extreme measure when all you want is to reinstall Safari? (I imagine, though, that Pacifist could extract it from a user-created installer and install it.)


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Weird Safari/System issue
Douglas #32148 12/16/14 03:47 PM
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Originally Posted By: Douglas
Yes, I used Migration Assistant to go from my old Mini to the new one. I don't recall the exact step by step but I printed out some information from MacWorld web site and followed it as far as I can remember.

All extensions up today and get the same message if all extensions are turned off.

All Internet Plug-ins are dated 2014.

Would deleting Safari and all associated files, restarting my Mini and downloading a new copy of Safari possibly correct this? Hadn't thought of this until this evening.

I don't thing Safari is any longer available as a separate download. You best bet would be to boot from the Recovery drive (Boot while holding ⌘R) then reinstall OS X. Whether that will cure your problem or not is unknown, but it cannot hurt. Mavericks is already out of date so it would not be amiss to go to the App Store and download and install Yosemite as long as you are doing a reinstallation. The upgrade is free.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Weird Safari/System issue
artie505 #32151 12/16/14 07:36 PM
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Originally Posted By: artie505
You never give up, do you? wink

Nope.

Originally Posted By: artie505
Especially not when there's maybe still something to be learned.

When even the wizards of the Mac are stumped, perhaps it's time to move on. tongue
Douglas's Safari is well and truly fratzed and probably should be given a decent burial. cool
Besides, who wants to spend Christmas crawling around in the bowels of the system? crazy
Run! Run like the wind! wink

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
Douglas #32152 12/16/14 08:02 PM
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Originally Posted By: Douglas
First, looking at Users & Groups there are only 2 listing: Douglas Holley 1 and Guest. That is all. If I start with my HD and go to the Users Folder there are 3 items: douglasholley1, Guest and Shared.

OK, good. That means that when you deleted douglasholley, you deleted the actual account (in Users & Groups), and not just the account's home folder.

Not related to your problem, but you should not be seeing /Users/Guest. The guest account works differently under Lion and later than it did in Snow Leopard and earlier. /Users/Guest will be created when you log in as Guest, and deleted when Guest logs out. No matter. Log in once as Guest and immediately log out, and /Users/Guest will be gone, as it should be.

Originally Posted By: Douglas
If I right click and select 'Advanced Options' it shows Account Name as douglasholley1 (with no other choices) and Home Directory /Users/douglasholley1

There wouldn't be any choices. It's a text field. You'd change it by typing a new value. BUT DON'T DO THAT! If you want to change your username from douglasholley1 back to douglasholley, we can walk you through that, but let's first figure out your problem.

You haven't told me what happens when you check for an alias file pointing to /Users/douglasholley/Library/something. Try this:

In Finder, select your home folder (/Users/douglasholley1, or use Go→Home (⌘⇧H)), then type ⌘F to open a Find window. When the Find window opens, you'll see a line that says Search: [This Mac] ["douglasholley1"], with the latter button highlighted. (If the button isn't there, you weren't looking at your home folder when you entered ⌘F. Close the window and try again. If it's there but not highlighted, click on it to highlight it.)

The line below that says [Kind] is [Any]. Pull down the [Any] menu and select "Other". In the text field that appears, enter alias.

You should now have a list of all the alias files in your home folder. Well, most of them, anyway. We're especially interested in aliases in your ~/Library folder, which would qualify them as "system files". To add "system files" to the list, click on the [+] button at the end of the [Kind] is [Other] alias line. In the new line that appears, change the first menu to [System files]. (If "System files" isn't on the menu, select "Other" and scroll through the list that appears until you find "System files" and click on that.) Change the second item on that line so that the whole line now reads [System files] [are included].

Hopefully there still won't be many. See if any are relevant. (Examples of relevant aliases would be aliases that have "cache" or "safari" or "downloads" anywhere in their name.)

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
ganbustein #32154 12/16/14 08:44 PM
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Applications don't rot on disk. Uninstalling and reinstalling Safari (or any other application) would be a lot of useless work.

Before OS X, applications were resource files that modified themselves as they ran, and it was not unusual for an application to corrupt itself. Those days are long past.

If your permissions are set right (and they are for anything installed by Apple), you couldn't modify an application even if you tried. If Safari did somehow get altered on disk, it would no longer pass its signature check, and the OS would refuse to run it.

Don't waste time thinking of ways to reinstall Safari. The app is fine.


The reference to /Users/douglasholley has to be coming from somewhere. I suggested earlier:

Originally Posted By: ganbustein
See what you get from the Terminal command
defaults read com.apple.Safari | grep Library

The only hit I get for that is WebIconDatabaseImportDirectoryDefaultsKey = "~/Library/Safari/Icons";.

You might as well also try defaults read com.apple.Safari | grep douglasholley

I'm still waiting to see the output from that. That will tell us if the problem is in Safari's preferences.

IF the problem is in the preferences, we can either correct the problem or delete the preferences. You can no longer (and in truth never could reliably) delete preferences by moving .plist files, but defaults delete com.apple.Safari still works. But I doubt very much it will help, assuming the defaults read com.apple.Safari | grep -i ... tests all come up negative.

I'm currently thinking he had an alias to /Users/douglasholley/Library/Caches/Safari on his old mini, and Migration Assistant dutifully copied it verbatim. Safari is tripping over that alias somehow.

Repairing home permissions won't help. Despite the fact that the error message says "You do not have permission to create...", this isn't really a permissions problem. The problem is that Safari is somehow being directed out into the boondocks. It's true that Safari doesn't have permission to create anything in the boondocks, but that's as it should be and as it will still be after repairing home permissions.

Switching to another browser won't tell us what's going on, and I for one would like to get to the bottom of this. (Besides, I like Safari. It's the only browser I use.)

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
ganbustein #32169 12/16/14 11:38 PM
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I am going to Repair Permissions on my Home Folder in the next couple of day if I can find the time, family and holidays you know, and will report back.

As a side note, after I got my new Mini set up I got busy deleting the language files the applications and I accidentally deleted english from one application and it would not open. I created a partition on my external HD and installed a fresh copy of Mavericks onto that partition. I deleted the damaged application and copied over the fresh copy from my external HD. I still have that copy of Mavericks on my external HD and it has never been booted and has Safari 7.0.5.

What about deleting Safari and associated files/folders from my internal HD, rebooting and then copying the never opened 7.0.5 version over to my internal HD?

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
Douglas #32170 12/17/14 12:36 AM
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Originally Posted By: Douglas
I am going to Repair Permissions on my Home Folder in the next couple of day if I can find the time, family and holidays you know, and will report back.

As a side note, after I got my new Mini set up I got busy deleting the language files the applications and I accidentally deleted english from one application and it would not open. I created a partition on my external HD and installed a fresh copy of Mavericks onto that partition. I deleted the damaged application and copied over the fresh copy from my external HD. I still have that copy of Mavericks on my external HD and it has never been booted and has Safari 7.0.5.

What about deleting Safari and associated files/folders from my internal HD, rebooting and then copying the never opened 7.0.5 version over to my internal HD?

Knock yourself out, but I doubt it will help. Nothing in your current problem indicates anything wrong with either Safari.app or with home folder permissions. You do get an error message saying you do not have permissions to create /Users/douglasholley/Library/Caches/Safari, but that's as it should be. You should not have permission to create that, and still won't after repairing home folder permissions.

By default, any files (including application) that you copy will end up owned by you. Apple's applications should be owned by root. After the copy, you'll probably have to fix up the permissions. (Use Disk Utility to Repair Permissions. Usually that's a waste of time, but if you specifically and intentionally mess up permissions, you need to specifically and intentionally repair them. You'll get a slew of bogus error messages, which you should ignore.)

"Safari and related files" is a lot more than you might imagine. Safari uses a system called Webkit to actually render web content, and "installing Safari" is mostly about installing Webkit, none of which is actually inside the Safari app. Webkit is used all over the place. Help pages, for example, are displayed using Webkit. The App Store uses Webkit. iTunes uses Webkit. (That's why, for example, it is not possible to "roll back" to an older version of Safari. You'd have to also roll back to a prior version of Webkit, which would break a lot of apps.)

I do not recommend fixing a broken system by copying files around. Unless you really know what you're doing, there's too much risk of borking things up. Copying individual apps can probably be done safely (as long as you fix permissions afterward, which I would do with sudo chown -R root:wheel /Applications/theApplication.app), but Safari is not an "individual app" and cannot be reinstalled so easily. The surest way to reinstall pieces of the OS is to run the Combo updater or re-run the installer. (If you've installed updates since you installed, you will need to re-download the installer to get one for the latest version.)


If you want to satisfy yourself that Safari is installed correctly, go into System Preferences→Users & Groups and create a new user. Log in as that user, give Safari a spin, and see how it goes.

And then satisfy my curiosity by checking out the things I've asked you to check out.

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
ganbustein #32176 12/17/14 05:36 PM
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For the first terminal command I get the following:

CacheDirectory = "/Users/douglasholley/Library/Caches/Safari"

For the second terminal command I get:

"AppleNavServices:PutFile:0:Path" = "file://localhost/Users/douglasholley/Movies/";
"file://localhost/Users/douglasholley/Movies/"
CacheDirectory = "/Users/douglasholley/Library/Caches/Safari";
Douglas-Holley:~ douglasholley1$

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
Douglas #32178 12/17/14 06:34 PM
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Originally Posted By: Douglas
CacheDirectory = "/Users/douglasholley/Library/Caches/Safari"

Aha! We've found it!

Quit Safari, and enter the Terminal command

defaults delete com.apple.Safari CacheDirectory

When you start up Safari again, your problem should be gone.

Added note: the two references to /Users/douglasholley/Movies are Safari remembering that the last time you saved a file that's where you saved it. That's just so next time you save a file Safari can suggest saving it in the same place. But it will be just a suggestion, and Safari won't mind that the folder is no longer there.

Last edited by ganbustein; 12/17/14 06:53 PM. Reason: Added note
Re: Weird Safari/System issue
ganbustein #32181 12/17/14 09:25 PM
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Applied your Terminal command and it worked like a charm, no more Console messages showing for Safari now.

My sincere THANKS and I hope that Santa beings you something special.

Also, my sincere thanks to everyone who helped in solving this issue and wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season.

Re: Weird Safari/System issue
ganbustein #32189 12/18/14 08:38 AM
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Originally Posted By: ganbustein
Aha! We've found it!

Well done.


ryck

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