This!!!
Literally most of this!!!
“Put down the sacrificial dagger and step away from the goat.” Tsk, typical. I make all the effort of finding a remote hillock in Wales and an inexpensive black doe for my pagan ritual and I’m not even halfway through the banishing ceremony. It’s wet and cold and the trailing edges of my robes are muddy, and now some norm in a …
Here is some more "this" then:
Safari also doesn't like you click buttons and links too quickly. If you do, you will be told that the webserver has unexpectedly shut down the connection which is utter tosh, and the bug shows a strict adherence to Murphy's law insofar that it pulls this one if you're just about to confirm some major config change that took ages to get right.
Which is why I now use Firefox for that sort of work (no, sorry, not interested in Google code on my Mac).
And don't get me started on Mail either.
Sounds to me like an objective c++ paradigm flaw.
It's easy to write async lambdas all over the place but it doesn't mean that your code can cope with state changes in the mean time.
Which reminds me, I think it was MSIE 2, I clicked to print a page and focus returned back to the browser while it was printing. I immediately guessed that if I navigated to another page while it was printing, the browser would crash.
And it did. Changing page WHILE it was printing was like replacing a paving stoe with a banana skin.
"Sounds to me like an objective c++ paradigm flaw.'
Sounds like shit coding to me.
"And it did. Changing page WHILE it was printing was like replacing a paving stoe with a banana skin."
See the above.
Why, oh why do software companies keep hiring infinite numbers of monkeys, then release the first thing that they bang out that compiles?
But jeez, just cut the stupid internet connection :p
It won't be going to any sites.
Still, your overall point is true enough, hence the title
The goal of software companies has changed from enabling business to blocking you and wasting as much of your time as possible, if you remain unwilling to get sucked into Farmville and the like.
I'm tracking around 50 bugs, some which I filed, and I think one was fixed in 2015.
Realistically Google are the only ones with the resources to build a webbrowser, and the spec is only growing more sprawling every month. That scares me, because Google aren't neutral and their agenda is beginning to shine though.
Nanny goats are good to eat, unpissed upon by the Billy;
Billy goats are foul and rank, behold, they drink their piss
to woo the nanny wi' randy tongue, to mount 'er, silly Billy!
'Tis very much akin The Trump, his randy tongue,
his givin' us the piss!
- - -
Vote 2016. It don't count fer shite,
'n it keeps the pollsters up all nite.
Try and see what happens when Chrome hits the Steam Community Market pages which eventually cause the "redirect loop" message to appear.
I guarantee that no matter how many times you clear cookies or whatever, it will come back eventually.
And there is NO way to configure how many HTTP redirects you want to allow, or turn it off, or access the page when it decides it's redirected too much. And there have been bugs open for years for exactly this problem.
Sadly, this also infects every Chrome-based browser (Vivaldi, etc.), which is probably why the Steam in-built browser is actually WebKit.
I have a nagging suspicion that web browsers are spawns of dark magic. In that case, it would be folly to throw any further amounts at them, it only makes them stronger.
Well-aimed lightning bolts have somewhat better chances. If your Mac is reduced to a smoldering ruin, then evil ghosts will have to leave. Probably.
I have often penned letters to the BBC requesting that their dramas be more realistic, showing full frontal nudity and graphic sex scenes uncensored in their entirety, but hey ho, they just don't listen.
However, when I write to the developers of internet browsers, asking them to accommodate, cross site-scripting, injected code, and lots of other useful tools for the wannabe merchants of malevolence, they drop everything and gleefully get on with turning, arguably the greatest invention of modern times, into the seven headed, nine i'd, beast of regressive morality.
I can't see or hear what I'm looking for, for the cacophony of whistles and bells that are thrust at me.
Grr, a hideous pox on all their houses.
...Err, is that goat and dagger still handy?
Working for me too. Each browser has its pros and cons; there's no one size fits all. I use three browsers: Tor, Firefox (with lots of privacy add ons), and Safari. Which one I use depends on what I'm doing. I consider it leveraging the strengths of each browser rather than pushing it to do something its not good at.
Still remember that, and Mosaic (which still supported gopher)
There were of course so few websites in the days of Mosaic that you could conceivably test your browser on all of them
Now I tend to use Firefox under Linux and Windows, and Chrome on Android. Works for me.
... push my fist through plate glass and drag my wrists along its edges, - 20 some sutures later...
I actually had this Safari problem too... I wasn't looking for any hills in Wales, but the phone number of a good therapist... Then I unchecked everything under Search in Safari Preferences.
@Dan 55
Excellent advice, run away... Got some tips? I am open to suggestions. Camino was my choice back in the day. Now I have many accounts to manage, and would like Chrome's nose out of my bidnus.... Don't mention FF, and I have tried Vivaldi, bookmark import helli... have I covered your suggestion?
Got sane tips?
Please share!
> You'd have to sacrifice the whole population of London in order to upgrade iTunes into a simply dreadful programme. Anything less and you just make it stronger.
.
The only reason I ever installed whyTunes (and in a MSWin VM at that, since it just refuses to work under Wine) was to use a $50 gift card I got. And you know what? Over a year later, I still have $12 credit on it (the jPop selection on whyTunes stinks).
I remember 98 had the IE cache timbomb throughout its life (was never patched) so it may well have continued into ME *spits* - didn't suffer that for long enough to look. Didn't 95 have its own (non IE) shell?.. so MS's little IE landmine wouldn't have b0rken that entire OS.
If one ran that little registry script from Win95lite.com that deleted IE and Outlook express Win95 would burble along very happily for days. Good idea to keep number of running programs below 3 though. I remember Netscape just working. Easier to use compared to Firefox now. How I hate hidden or non-existent menus that require clicking on meaningless icons to make a careless semi-appearance. The freezes on newer releases are also annoying and this is Windows XP where 10 releases ago it was usable, stable and unfrozen. Cant stand Win8, even with classic shell as removing Win10 upgrade patches installed against configuration settings was getting to be like work. I despair as Win 8 even with i7 CPU and many GB of RAM, basic web browsing is no faster than Win3.1 one days with 56k modem and Winsock. Anyone remember the QNX OS and web browser on a 1.44 Meg floppy ? Small and fast could be done, once.
But I digress. Keep at it Dabsy, I feel a feloow bitter soul developing. :-)
I had a similar problem with Linux on my Vaio some 10 years ago. One day, it just randomly started freezing. Sometimes more than once a day but sometimes a whole week would go by. There was no rhyme or reason to it. It drove me crazy and at one point, I swore blind it was the graphics drivers and said some rather silly things in a Mesa bug report. Eventually I somehow got in touch with someone with the exact same model and within days, they realised it the was ACPI driver for the CPU. Sure enough, I blacklisted that and all was well. Turns out it wasn't Linux's fault though. When I later tried Vista on the same machine, it would barely even make it to the first setup screen before freezing up hard. This was exactly the same problem and I had to disable the equivalent driver there. That wasn't easy. I think I had to modify the ISO and then intercept the install to disable it again after the first reboot. If only I'd known how much Vista sucked beforehand.
Once upgraded a video card in my work Linux machine and it would randomly crash. Spent hours and hours of frustrating time with video drivers of various release versions and even a new kernel. Went back to old card and setting and STILL crashed!
Turned out the PSU was on its way out and the power cycling was the last straw. Changed that and all was fine, except for two days of my life wasted :(
Cheers
1 pound boneless goat loin, cut into 1/2" cubes
1 cup plain low fat yogurt
2 Tbs orange juice
1 Tbs ground coriander
1/4 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt
skewers
In a medium bowl, stir together yogurt, orange juice and all seasonings. Blend well. Add the goat meat cubes to the bowl, stir to coat with the marinade, cover and refrigerate for 4 - 24 hours.
Remove the meat from the marinade, pat lightly with paper towels to dry. Place meat evenly on the skewers. Grill over medium-hot coals, turning frequently, for about 10 minutes until nicely brown.
"Wouldn't returning the goat a pound lighter affect his chances of a refund?"
Depends whether the goat had agreed to the rather onerous non-payment penalties when it first took out that 3000 ducat loan it got into trouble with.
Should have gone to a bank instead of a merchant of venison and goat meat.
I would just like to say that that was the most astonishingly brilliant bit of rant I've seen in a long, long while, Dabbsy, and as a result, I am applying for you to be added to the pantheon of demi-gods of Ikabai-Sital.
Yours in awestruck worshipfulness,
Esme (High Priestess of Ikabai-Sital)
I take computers apart and fix them, or strip them for parts. For pay, for fun. Doing this where other computers can see this causes those computers to work very reliably :D
This also explains why errors that others get don't recur when I'm there. Sheer terror on the part of the machine in question.
Swearing is medically proven to help you both feel better and enhance your problem solving skills.
Google owns my soul anyway, so chrome is the devils own browser ;)
errors that others get don't recur when I'm there. Sheer terror on the part of the machine in question.
I have a reputation for this. Any user that calls me to look at what his machine isn't doing / is doing wrong usually finds that my standing behind them glaring at the machine makes all the errors go away...
Or maybe it's the 2lb Lump hammer I'm idly tapping on the palm of the other hand...
I often myself wondered why when I use to build and fix machines that when on site or a customer brought one back they refuse to produce the same error or any error.
I haven't sacrifice any animals though I do ritualistically eat bacon while chanting the eternal mantra of brown sauce. Maybe this is the sauce of my mystical computer powers?
Threatening all manner of electronic devices works for me. It might have to do with my close familiarity with 20,000 volts or more on a regular basis. And I'm quite sure the devices have passed on the horrors regularly visited upon their beings in my laboratory. Repeatedly. With malice aforethought.
Now why mechanical devices work for me is a mystery as I'm pretty amechanical.
Have you tried The Laundry Files?
M.
you should really know better.
any experience IT bod will have two if not three tools available "just in case".
As for browsers on my Macbook
Firefox LTS is what works for me. Safari is there just in case and for those sites that have 40+ tracking cookies and crap that is loaded with every page.
No flash on the system though.
Email, is Thunderbird with Apple Mail as a backup.
etc
etc
etc
so, Mr Dabbs what are your backup apps then? I am sure that your readership would like to know.
>Safest way to browse, is to make yourself a browsing VM, which is both portable and cannot take down your main OS.
Whonix.
Or (WINE+) Portable Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Dragon/whatever.
My choice; SSH into a remote machine from my Whonix workstation and connect to the Whonix gateway on the remote machine - my ISP knows who I am but not what I'm doing; the remote ISP knows what I'm doing but not who I am.
A friends dad solved that problem, made her watch the entirety of The World at War, at the age of three. Permanently traumatised her but Disney never got a look in. Has anyone else found kiddies TV mildly horrifying recently? Cross-dressing Jimmy Saville cringe-alikes for the 2 year olds and foot fetishist lemurs and the Penguin Separatist Front for the older ones, not to mention the bring-out-yer-gays homopalooza that is Spongebob. cBeebies, creating psychopaths with your TV licence. Not to forget airborne flamethrowers with a side order of unstabilised projectiles and lava vomit (all in a good cause naturally) sort of America in Vietnam for 8 year olds (unsanctioned massacres that didn't happen anyway, not included). And differently able Vikings making a contribution to society..
That is why I make 7 backups of my machine...
Seriously, I like Firefox a lot. Except on my mobile device where it appears to have a crash anticipation feature that causes the browser to exit right when you've reached the bit of the webpage you want to read that you clicked through a dozen referrers to get to...
> ... the rest of The Register has gone all PC?
Cannot say the Reg is PC. The ongoing experiment on how much "hyperconverged agile cloud flash devoops" needs to be inflicted on the readers to make their collective brains explode, however, worries me.
When did Apple and Microsoft switch clothes?
Upgrade to Edge and your troubles will be far behind you. Jeez I didn't realize that Apple's had so many ways to crash and burn and crash and burn and crash and burn and well you get the idea. Seriously, no sarcasm here, myself not being a macMan I've never realized how unstable that house of cards had grown. I've made my money from Micro$ofts houses of cards over the years and thus cut my teeth on BSOD's (explaining my horrific flashback when experiencing my first PSOD courtesy of VMware).
And what is this PRat or PRam thing? Bong, Bong, Bong? Ask not for whom the bell tolls? How frickin cool is that!?!?!
"I've never realized how unstable that house of cards had grown"
That's nothing.
Try working in Xcode on a Mac more than one week old with iTunes running in the background. To me that's proof that the 2nd law of thermodynamics also applies to software.
At times like that I think Douglas Adams was right - we should probably never have come down from the trees.
Have one on me, everyone.
Errr ... All the laws of thermodynamics apply to EVERYTHING ....
1st law : You cannot win.
2nd law : You cannot break even
3rd law : You cannot quit the game
IIRC Ivar Jacobson has a small section entitled Software Entropy in one of his books ... But then again analysis and design is old hat these days ...
The PRam (silent P) is a male goat that must be sacrificed every time something goes slightly wrong on a Mac. You sacrifice it by electrocuting it, hence "zapping the PRam". After zapping the PRam you will be bestowed good fortune and may then proceed to efficaciously diagnose and remedy the problem with the software in question.
Ahh! I see we have another unit to add to el Reg's collection.
When me and my mates were younger, and up to our elbows in various automobiles, the minimum increment of distance or tightness was referred to as an RCH -- Royal C*nt Hair.
At least three of the automobiles were British. One was German. The German one used the MCH - Metric...
your "goat cleansing" ritual symbolic, then, of clearing the browser's cache? Eh? The goat being representative of the contents of the cache which you, metaphorically of course, get rid of? Eh? Want to see the back of, eh? He asks knowingly. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Say no more?
It didn't for me. But it did introduce lengthy pauses whilst the Safari rendering engine occupied huge amounts of system resources. Seems that the "Safari rendering engine" is used by many, many apps for ways of displaying XML-subset marked up files. Safari gets first dibs on the rendering engine's time it appears, and any hold up in Safari impacts the performance / user experience of other applications.
No idea; I've often had apps crash without affecting system stability. Hardware faults are more of a problem. Last year my trusty Logitech-branded trackball went on the fritz: while it usually worked, once in a while it would do something that took down the entire USB system. All the USB ports go dead, but everything else is still running, so I could SSH in and reboot, which fixed it for anywhere between a few weeks and a few minutes. Replacing the trackball finally fixed it for good.
Not that useful as a unit of measurement, seeing as how Scottish gnats seem to be about the size of an albatross with the teeth of a velociraptor.
Much though I repsepct and fear the Free Scotland Airforce they are not a pinch on their equivalents in Alaska. Although at least you have a good chance of downing them with a large bore hunting rifle.
El Reg won't let me post the quoted html from crashsafari.com here, but somebody has already done so at pastebin. I don't know whether the Google Analytics thing is the culprit within the javascript, or the huge loop shoving stuff into the browser history. Probably the latter.
Edit: explanation here[github.com], including why it crashes not only Safari.
Second Edit
Who the hell thought this was a good idea?
HTML5 introduced the history.pushState() and history.replaceState() methods, which allow you to add and modify history entries, respectively.
The HTML5 history.pushState() and history.replaceState() are just pure evil waiting to abuse millions of users.
I would love to have all browsers support a permissions text file (so sysadmins can properly maintain it) with entries like:
history.replaceState() disable
history.pushState() disable
Who the hell thought this was a good idea?
HTML5 introduced the history.pushState() and history.replaceState() methods, which allow you to add and modify history entries, respectively.
Quite. The history is for the client/browser to use it is sees fit. It should not be accessible or modifiable by any external source.
Haven't tried it on Windows, but "crashsafari" with Firefox on Mint Linux causes FF to pause for about 10 seconds, then tell me a script is unresponsive, to which I click "stop script", and it gracefully recovers. Whilst doing this, the video playback in my other FF window was utterly unaffected.
Haven't tried it on Windows, but "crashsafari" with Firefox on Mint Linux causes FF to pause for about 10 seconds, then tell me a script is unresponsive, to which I click "stop script", and it gracefully recovers.
That's because the script blocks the browser while it fills your history to bursting.
This page will hang chrome and Firefox until they time out:
<html><head><script>for(;;);</script></head></html>
Haven't tried it on Windows, but "crashsafari" with Firefox on Mint Linux causes FF to pause for about 10 seconds, then tell me a script is unresponsive, to which I click "stop script", and it gracefully recovers.
That's because the script blocks the browser while it fills your history to bursting.
This page will hang chrome and Firefox until they time out:
<html><head><script>for(;;);</script></head></html>
Um... same result. 5-10 seconds of busy, then dialog asking if I want to stop the script. (unless this is what you mean by timing out) Other browser windows unaffected.
The "crashsafari" page does put an impressive number of entries into my history for the day, but other than the annoyance of that, doesn't harm anything when using FF, and only makes the current window unresponsive for some seconds until it comes to its senses.
I was going to write something about you owning me not only a new keyboard, but also a paint job in the wall behind my monitor and the cleaning of several pieces of furniture, but I find myself unable to write long texts due to uncontrollable bouts of giggling.
On a more serious note, I tried that crashsafari site on both Chrome and Mozilla. Mozilla stuttered for a bit and then presented me with a 'script taking too long' warning. I stopped the script and everything worked nicely. Chrome crashed, but I was able to close it without having to resort to the task manager.
Next test: trying this page in both browsers (plus Chromium) in my Ubuntu and Mint VMs.
Whitehat Aviator was implicated in leaving interesting malware on my machine (and before you ask, that was code obtained from their website, not from some download.com). It managed to install a hidden volume which would get reloaded on boot, and if it had not been for me trying out some file systems I would have never spotted it. Digging into it showed Aviator to be the source.
It was time to rebuild anyway, so I did. Haven't touched anything of theirs since.
Vivaldi is now in beta, and it seems to work OK other than a VERY annoying habit to add a tab with the intro page to every new browser window you open. I mainly use it to confuse websites :).
There may be a setting for that extra tab somewhere, but I wonder why the heck that annoyance happens to be a default in the first place.
This is the closest thing I was able to find: Thanks Smokey
On a side note: Are you perchance an elder relative of little Bobby Tables?
Talking of "Gnats cock" as a unit of size, a friend of mine, in the production engineering business, used to regard, as the standard unit of size significance was "half a gnats pubic hair". The removal of such would give two mating parts the proper sliding fit. Here's to you Bob!
stepping around the goat and into the fray... I was going to suggest Opera, but as that's a shiny piece of chrome these days perhaps, as was early suggested by AC, Vivaldi? El Reg bleated last year about new browsers, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/03/new_browsers_stagnation_breaker/ Personally, when I'm hankering for a bit of self-flagellation, I revert to Lynx, and Pine my e-mail. Ah, the good 'ol days... ;)
Add my data points here.
Had numerous inexplicable memory related problems but resolved them by doing the following.
1) added thermal interface material so they all ran at the same temperature
2) Underclocked them, found that DDR2-400 and DDR3 8500s seem to be particularly glitchy on some netbooks notably the Atom ones and some newer Intel Core2 Duos.
3) Replaced the ones on my x520 with 2GB 10600s and problem go byebye.
Interestingly the fail seems to occur when the memory has been in use for a while, almost like bits in the SPD chip get flipped. I've compared to identical modules but can't seem to find anything obvious so its probably some component degrading like a ceramic capacitor corroding its endcaps.
i can be reached online as have some other interesting hacks such as adding realtime thermal feedback strips for increased reliability.
Safari becomes very unstable when the hard drive starts to fail. Oddly enough I was getting bad blocks on my iMac but the S.M.A.R.T stuff was saying the disk is fine.
When Apple brought out OS X for the Power PC processor they still were compiling for Intel in house and that found quite a few bugs that way. Once they dropped all support for Power PC, their bug ratios started to climb. I wonder how quickly the 1st bug would be found if they tried to build it on the PPC platform today. I'm also a fan of making sure developers have access to a very old supported platform and making sure they use it from time to time so they get a better feel for real world issues seeing that their top of the line box with fast cpus, massive displays, surplus ram and fast disks isn't what the end users are using.
At work most things are Intel based Linux but we have some Sparc as well. I asked a coder to compile his buggy code for the Sparc platform and he said it was a waste of time since it didn't compile correctly and it crashed but according to him that was a result of the platform not his bugs. Some of the least buggy open source code will happily build on some very old and bizarre platforms yet the buggiest code seems to require very specific platforms.
I'm also a fan of making sure developers have access to a very old supported platform and making sure they use it from time to time so they get a better feel for real world issues seeing that their top of the line box with fast cpus,
Slower/lesser machines are very useful for observing differences a code change makes which wouldn't be anywhere near (if at all) noticeable on faster machine. Good for ensuring code is optimised. Still good idea to do final test on something near production spec in case running on faster environment causes race conditions etc.
Some of the least buggy open source code will happily build on some very old and bizarre platforms yet the buggiest code seems to require very specific platforms.
Yes. Some well written code still compiles nicely even on SunOS 4, Ultrix 4.3 etc.
Other code, often dependent on some latest bleeding edge dev library for no reason, just won't.
Been a while since I had to port anything to any old platform, but when I did I found that code originally developed on *BSD was usually easiest to port (or compiled as it is).
Instead of interfering with a goat on a hillside has the writer at any point in this saga opened Console and had a gander at system.log to find out what is going on with these crashes? You'd be amazed what you can find out about what lies behind such problems by doing more, looking deeper, than simply throwing up your hands and claiming it's all beyond you. Computers are logical, there's always a reason for anything they do, you just have to look hard enough to find it.
For example, ever since I upgraded to OS X 10.11 I've been having issues with ejecting an external HD that I often use to transfer & convert videos from another Mac running EyeTV. Often, but not every time, I was told the volume couldn't be ejected and would I like to retry the operation (which usually failed) or force eject the bugger. I usually took that option though I knew it wasn't good to have to keep doing this.
After months of this nonsense I finally decided to get to the bottom of it once and for all - when I next encountered the issue I ran "sudo lsof | grep /Volumes/<VolumeName>" and discovered it was fscking Spotlight trying to index the contents of the disk! But surely that couldn't be, I'd disabled Spotlight on that disk years ago... A visit to System Preferences/Spotlight/Privacy showed that in fact this was no longer the case, somewhere along the line (I suspect during the 10.11 upgrade process) the "ignore <VolumeName>" setting had been lost and so Spotlight was holding onto the disk like grim death trying to index it's contents. Now the disk ejects every time just like it should.
At no point in this saga was I tempted to sacrifice a goat on a windy hillside, or use Chrome.
Computers are logical, there's always a reason for anything they do, you just have to look hard enough to find it.
This is of course a red herring.
The complexity of what is going on may well move the "looking hard enough" into NP-hard, if not make it uncomputable altogether.
YOU MAY NEVER FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING WRONG. DEAL WITH IT!
As it's saturday I had time to do some research and I think I found at least some answers:
If you experience problems with a web browser you must sacrifice a steer or an oxen.
Sacrifying a female goat apparently is the thing to do when it's a faulty hardware driver, except for on-board graphics. That will take either a white female sheep or a black male goat, the sources I found are somewhat unclear on that particular point. Further study seems to be indicated.
And if you have printer problems - forget it. Male unicorn.
Someone must have published one of the April 1st articles early as this is obviously a joke. Everyone knows that Apple products "just work" and never require users to fiddle with such mundane things as settings, cache, cookies, etc. And crash? Never!
This is obviously a story about a Windows user that someone replaced all the references for IE & PC with Safari and MacBook. After all, we know nothing on those crappy Windows machines ever works and they crash constantly - every version, including all future ones.
SeaMonkey, Mr Dabbs.. SeaMonkey. It is a fork of FF based on the old Netscape Communicator suite and it runs quite snappy.
http://www.seamonkey-project.org
(I quit on Safari back when Panther 10.3 was the current OS - it was shite back then and I see nothing has happened to change that.)
Get it and run with uBlock Origin and NoScript and you're golden.
Safari is a total bag of dicks.. big floppy limp ones that stiffen at the most inopportune time and bone your system..
It's a long time since I've had hands on experience with Apple Macs - System 6 on a Quadra comes to mind. So was a bit surprised that it's still a thing on Apple stuff, it bought back memories.
Will be interested to hear the "correct" way to zap it though - I found that I had to use both hands on the keyboard, so had to take my shoe off so I could manoeuvre the mouse with my foot to select restart.