When you type realty.com into Safari it takes you to realtor.com
facebook.com
facebook.com
Oh, while I'm here: trying to escape out of the autocomplete suggestion is also awful, it's some sort of combination of ⎋ and ⌫ and the arrow keys until you can get the thing to not show up in the bar, and then you have to look very closely to make sure that it's not going to send you to the Top Hit anyways.
Folks who can reproduce the "sketch" --> "sketchers.com" behavior or the "realty.com" --> "realtor.com" behavior, would any of you be willing to file the issue via Feedback Assistant (only needs a free developer.apple.com account) with a sysdiagnose and a screen recording? Then give me the FB number.
I can get the Safari team to look at this, but I can't reproduce either behavior myself. Any other examples of bogus/unexpected autocomplete also welcome.
I looked at the FB# cited in the parent, but it doesn't have a specific example or a sysdiagnose. Since may of these things only reproduce for some users, we need all the data we can get to resolve these issues.
Two different Danish newspapers. Can't be true I can only use one of them :)
Me neither.
manOS Catalina, Version 10.15.5. Safari Version 13.1.1 (15609.2.9.1.2)
EDIT: Still can't get used to Safari's URL completion behaviour. It is completely unnatural and hard to feel as useful, unlike chrome's which is very handy and behaves like I expect.
Speaking of that, I’d just like to say one more thing on this topic while I still have your attention here. While the things I mentioned here could have been filed a bit better, aside from that I really do try my best to report things I find, often in great detail and depth that I specifically take time out of my day for. I run Safari Technology Preview ten hours a day, every day, on whatever the latest developer beta is. (Yes, I’m running Big Sur and using yesterday’s build.) I think Safari is a great browser; I know everyone on the team is passionate and cares about making it better, and I’m sure they’d be disappointed to hear that I’m going around calling some part of it “totally broken” on a reasonably sized social website and that my experience is clearly shared by many of the people here.
But the usual Apple complaint still applies here: they need to be more responsive to reports, and yes they need to actually fix their stuff. I know this is not your team, and that you probably don’t have much control over this, but you’re surely in contact with them often and I’d appreciate it if you could remind them. I have filed literally dozens of Safari bugs in the last few years. It’s probably the component I file bugs against the most because I use it so much and because I care very much that it works right. But it’s disheartening to see maybe half of them getting any response at all, and of those just a couple with actual responses that are not just “please attach a sysdiagnose” or “this bug has been marked as a duplicate”. It’s disheartening to find bugs in Safari Technology Preview running on a developer seed and have them be ignored as they slowly make their way into public beta Safari and then into an official release where other people run into it. It’s disheartening when I can go a month without being able to launch Safari Technology Preview with it crashing immediately until I literally take a binary diff of Safari.framework, disassemble it, and find the exact change made and the circumstances that made it crash, and highlight it in a red circle along with a suggested patch to get it fixed correctly (Safari Technology Preview releases 37 and 38, rdar://problem/33815640, rdar://problem/34167199). More recently I was having crashes every two hours-or under load, even more frequently-because of something which I will bet you $10 is a data race in Safari’s Remote Web Inspector Lockdown code (this has stopped crashing but now causes an infinite loop, and I’ve become accustomed to attaching a debugger to Safari, breaking in the offending code, and suspending the lockdown queue from there; FB7660529). When you put out these prerelease builds and I take the time and effort to use them and file issues about them, I think the least I can expect is the bugs actually being fixed or barring even that just some acknowledgement of the issue. Thanks.
FWIW I have none of those sites “sketch, sketchers, realty, realtor” in my history or bookmarks
I got curious and tried the same, with the same results. And I have never before bought shoes online, ever.
But it's even worse than you said: the website is actually "skechers.com", with no t. So, when you type "sketch", Safari is guessing that you're misspelling the name of a shoe retailer.
EDIT: Could it be that the Suggestions system is taking the autocomplete candidate ("sketchrs" and "realty.comm") as its input (instead of what the user actually typed)? That would explain what I've read here except for the very first iPhone in the video...
The first suggested result was indeed skechers.com.
But then I hit enter (so the total keystrokes were "s k e t c h return") and it did a search in my default search engine for "sketch". Which is what I expected.
so what am I doing that you're not?
"s k e t c h SPACE return" got me the google search results.
I also tried the example in the OP link and typed "realty.com" and it went to realty.com as expected.
Funnily enough though, as proof that Safari suggestions are still broken despite the above examples working for me... if I now type in "sketch" again, it suggests "realty.com" as the top result. Wtf.
Odd that private browsing would impact the autocomplete behavior in that way...
I opened a new tab, typed in “sketch” saw Skechers.com below it, but just hit enter on the keyboard... went to Skechers.com.
I’ve never purchased shoes from Skechers.com and have only bought shoes online once before. (A pair of Tevas from amazon in 2019).
Edit: Just to mention, I use Firefox as my daily browser in both, so my safari does not have any history on both computers.
Note this is on the iOS 14 beta
I’ve always been frustrated with Chrome where it always tries to force the longest URL in my history that matches the current entry.
This behaviour everyone's describing from safari would fill me with so much rage. That shit would drive me nuts. Having non existent addresses being interpreted as search queries is annoying enough, if my browser started deciding my searches were random web addresses I'd lose my shit.
In the video shown above, you visually SEE "realty.comm" (there's an extra m there which I found very strange, which makes me think this is a bug), but when the person pressed enter, it goes to realtor.com. I expect pressing enter to run the query I see, not for it to change after I press enter.
I feel like default behaviour should be broadly helpful, while specifically helpful behaviour should be easily accessible but not so easily accessible that a mindless click triggers it.
But the way Apple is doing it is an uphill battle because without much context, it's harder to offer an anonymized solution. I remain hopeful it's just a buggy implementation and that they don't give up because I really like the model from a privacy perspective.
There are some things I miss about Safari, but the search bar behavior is not one of them.
I'm looking for a genuine honest answer here, this really isn't rhetorical. Every second thread regarding Apple seems to have top comments complaining about the quality of what Apple has become. The first I recall was the butterfly keyboard fiasco, then some others, then El Capitan and Big Sur bugs, then this.
Again, I really want to understand this: why the continued loyalty?
There are definitely things that are nicer on OSX, but there are also a lot of warts that people seem to gloss over. Finder is an absolute abomination as a file explorer and it boggles my mind that this is the best OSX has to offer after years of refinement. Having to install a separate utility to switch mouse scroll directions when using a BT mouse is also ridiculous. You have to shell out money just to have basic features your OS should provide like window management (Better touch tool / magnet).
External monitor rendering is really bad if you connect to a non HDPI monitor. Thunderbolt dock integration is pretty atrocious if you are trying to connect to more than one external monitor. And the OS keeps getting more locked down so opening a simple Word file takes > 5 seconds because of all the sandboxing going on in Catalina.
There are definitely things OSX / MBP does much better, but everyone acts like it is far superior to Windows-based laptops, and I have unfortunately been rather surprised at the large number of pain points I have had with my MBP... none of which have anything to do with me having spent more time on Windows.
There is a very good chance that a colleague of mine who has been a life-long OSX user and I will end up switching back to a windows-based laptop in a couple of years. Windows is far more dev friendly and with WSL2 + CUDA + GUI apps on the roadmap, a solid Windows laptop with an nVidia GPU looks like a much more interesting proposition even if I have to put up with some rough edges.
This perspective makes tons of sense. Safari is a rough edge for me, and I don't even use Apple - I think most of my hatred for the platform is derived from supporting that awful browser.
For my wedding website, I simply wanted to overlay some lines on MapBox with shadows to look like strings and pins on a map. My approach used dynamic SVG (changing a path attribute when the map is moved/tilted/whatever). This performed perfectly on my PC, on my Pixel and even the shitty Samsung browser my fiance uses. It completely annihilated all Apple devices I tried it on (locking up my friend's iPhone entirely), I had to remove the shadows. I really wish they would get it right, or allow alternate browser engines.
I can definitely see why the coffee-shop set would love this machine, since it works really well on the couch (disconnected from everything) but it's been borderline unusable tethered to my desk. In that situation, I don't care about the large trackpad, because I use the same external mouse as on all my other machines.
Don't even get me started on third party software quality.
I’ve used both side by side too. Other than the keyboard being better on Lenovo and trackpad being better on MacBook. The rest is same same to me.
I haven't had Windows do stupid shit in over two years. Updating it is a habit once in a while, possibly barely more frequently than it forces (unless I hear about a big vulnerability on HN). I'd probably be annoyed if I didn't understand how important updates were and kept postponing them (until it forced me to apply them, and it really does).
That's the only real complaint people really have of Windows these days. Then there's my complaint: Privacy.
Especially concerning Edge, that Microsoft keeps doing. It hasn't happened to me. Maybe because I have both FF and Chrome installed? Or some group policy I forgot I applied? I have no idea. During login a few days ago it asked for consent on a bunch of things that were previously opt-out, annoying for 2 minutes, but honestly healthy in the long run and a needed change.
Apple wins the privacy war any day of the week, but Windows really is Apple without the little annoyances. If you configure it like I did (and I couldn't tell you how).
I'm loyal to Apple because the alternatives are so terrible.
I guess the real question is, why are Windows people so loyal? I kind of get Linux loyalty and that would be my second choice.
I think the reason I'm still here is trust in the overall product, along with some heavily rose tinted glasses. I still use other products sometimes and almost always only find problems that would prevent me from switching. So perhaps it's also some monopolistic behavior impacting my personal behavior.
That said, I haven’t looked earnestly at Android phones for about 3 years. I also use an iPad as my primary computer for everything when I’m not on the clock, and I’m fairly confident there’s not much competition in the high-end tablet market.
It’s also the only fair comparison of Android to iOS: when using Pixel, the OS & hardware are dictated by Google just like Apple does with the OS & hardware for its phones.
I have good & bad to say about each, but pointless to share them. My peeves are nnot yours and vice-versa.
I won't be buying another Mac. Both OS X and MacBook design get worse with each new release, for years. They don't care about anything but iOS anymore--the Mac line is treated as a semi-portable accessory for your iPhone.
Yes, you do see issues with build quality, but all manufacturers have bugs. Overall, it is still much better than the alternatives.
It really boils down to macos, windows, or nix. Pick your poison. Cell phones are worse with only android and ios.
You’ll still get autocomplete from your own history (requiring you to press backspace before return to get a web search), but at least it won’t arbitrarily send you to sites you have never visited before.
Now, let's say I have a bookmark for "abcd.com" and I have visited "abcd.com" a million times. So the moment I am done typing "ab" in address bar I get abcd.com suggestion which is good.
Now one day I visit (or mistype and hit enter) "ab"ihkskgskkfsbkgbskgbks.com. Yes, just once. Now, for days I get the suggestion "abihkskgskkfsbkgbskgbks.com" when I type "ab" even though every time I type few more letters or delete and change it "abcd.com" before hitting enter. Or maybe for weeks because I just end up going to history and delete that abihkskgskkfsbkgbskgbks.com so that it would never show up in suggestions.
I wonder if there's some other setting I've changed that causes this difference in behaviour though.
Also here - I quit using desktop Safari just for this reason.
I could write a full URL, press enter, and Safari would take me to a different page on a different website from my history.
It then seems almost impossible to reach the URL I wanted. I got into the habit of copying the URL to the clipboard in case I needed to re-try, or use another browser.
(This doesn't appear to be happening to me right now)
I remember when I believed it. Then I actually got an iPhone and it killed that idea.
Cool box and fun signup, but it never felt quite intuitive.
I automatically clear my history every day. It sounds like a privacy issue when someone gets your phone.
Have a tab open that is changing its title on an interval.
Try to type something in any tabs address bar and use the arrow or a mouse to try and pick a result, the focus will constant jump and reset to the beginning every time the title changes on any tab, making it nearly impossible to pick a result if its changing fast enough.
The auto complete list seems to be populated with web page titles in real time and the list is being modified causing the results to be rerendered.
I found this after trying to use a Super Micro IPMI that updates the title with the current FPS on every frame, had it in a background tab and couldn't get to a search result, oh the frustration and time that cost me to actually track down.
Reported it to Apple of course nothing.
It essentially makes basic keyboard shortcuts useless on safari.
setInterval(() => document.title = `${Math.random()}`, 1000)For some reason, my mouse cursor moves back and forth when I use the arrow keys. Been happening for a while, but whatever.
Magic Mouse (KBM emulator) at some point got configured so that holding ctrl-shift-mousemove would snap the mouse to the PC in that direction.
Sooo, Ctrl-Shift-Left (highlight previous word, something I would do frequently [like just now to highlight and italicize 'frequently']) would end up also moving the mouse left a few pixels... which would send the mouse and keyboard over to the other PC.
Took me a few weeks to track that one down.
Edit: I have “Suggestions in Search” turned off, maybe that’s it?
When I enable private browsing, Safari correctly takes me to realty.com
When I disable private browsing, Safari takes me to realtor.com
I am in the US
This kind of egregious error is only the most obvious part.
Try doing a WebRTC conference call in Safari. Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Jitsi Meet, etc, etc, etc. None of them support Safari. Do you know why? It's because Safari is absolutely riddled with bugs: [1][2][3].
It is incredible how bad Safari is.
[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211181
Safari lacks features, it's inconsistent, it's full of bugs, and the worst part? There is nothing you can do about it, it's not like Apple allows other browsers access to the platform.
I can't even count the number of times where scrolling stops working, but then you refresh the page and it works again, even if it's the exact same HTML and CSS.
And then there was the issue hundreds of user complained about: the keyboard would not show up when pressing the url bar, on any page. Quitting and opening safari again usually fixed this.
For some reason iOS users seems to have no idea what's what. When the browser stops working, they usually contact me, like I would be able to do anything about it. Apple needs to take feedback from their users.
why should you have to only shell out money for some petty bs, if you randomly find a gold mining claim you go excavate the gold.
On the OSX side, the 'search' pane of settings has Safar Suggestions and Quick Website Search on, has preload top hit and show favorites off, and has DDG as the search. On IOS I have DDG as the search, and have Search Engine Suggestions, Safari Suggestions, and Quick Website Search on, and Preload Top Hit off. And have Frequently Visited Sites off.
It is worth mentioning that OSX Safari offered 'realtor.com' as a 'Top Hit' suggestion below the address bar, which I could have chosen with a quick downarrow, return, but at no point did it try to fill in autocomplete for me.
I almost wonder if this is happening to the owner of realty.com because they have spent a lot of time looking at realtor.com while building a site that competes with it, and Safari now thinks this is a site they really love to go to. — EDIT. Oh no I missed the part where there are videos of this being done on demo iPhones at the Apple store. Crazy! And not good.
That is seriously bad functionality. I've already been annoyed at iOS's keyboard overly autocorrecting, but to change a URL I typed in explicitly really pisses me off.
If you do get the extra m, can you play around and see what happens if you delete the extra m at the end? Does it go to realtor.co? realty.com?
No - this is why the video demo does it not on his devices (where previous personal history would be relevant) but on "clean" phones in Apple Store.
EDIT: even if I type "realty.com" and hit enter, I get taken to realtor.com.
I found that if I am in private browsing mode, this does not happen.
Of course the most obvious explanation of all is that someone set up a domain redirect for the sole purpose of getting a front page on HN and Reddit. This domain seems to be very poorly ranked, yet here everyone is plugging it into their browsers and telling Google and everyone else how very important it is.
My standard easy repro -- go to a long url and try to edit the second to last segment of the url path (something which i do for work frequently when folks send me links to projects under development).
Enjoy the frustration.
1. Touch the address bar and the keyboard will appear.
2. Long press on the spacebar (other parts of the keyboard won’t do it) until a cursor appears in the address bar.
3. Without lifting your finger after the long press, start dragging your finger left and right. The cursor will move.
Maybe writing that out will help me remember. If only there was some affordance in the ui indicating this common use is supported.
I'll paste in a full (http:// or https://) URL and hit Enter, but instead of loading the requested URL it just reloads the current page. I sometimes have to paste it a couple times before it will actually load the URL I want.
Anyone else encountered this or am I just going crazy?
Mobile Safari had a bug for a year where the zoom function would get stuck somehow, breaking rendering completely. I wonder how that happened too.
It seems like it has something to do with the cadence of when I press the return key while it's loading suggestions into the autocomplete dropdown. It's almost as if pressing return is selecting an item that isn't in the dropdown list yet. If I paste a URL and wait a second or two I never have that problem. It's when I'm moving quickly that I frequently run into it.
Typing a space at the end of the URL and waiting a second before hitting enter seems to circumvent this issue.
I've reported a couple of bugs that are still there, years after I reported them.
See this one for example reported in 2016:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162512
Or this other one from 6 months ago and still no response from the team:
Apple is in way over its head trying to build/maintain a web browser on mobile and desktop.
Only then we'd be able to have an idea of the sheer extent of bugginess of their products, and how the heavily advertised features never work. I hope someone with energy and time actually creates and maintains an open, alternative bugzilla for that purpose specifically.
Second google result for ‘report apple bug’ :
If you want to be sure you're executing a search, either use a keyword for Google or start your query with a question mark. A quick way to execute a search is to hit control+k, which puts focus to the URL bar and prepopulates it with "? " so that whatever you type after it is executed as a search.
I actually dislike it when Firefox does the opposite for websites like pi.hole or fritz.box. The domain does resolve, but you get redirected to a search page regardless and Firefox put a suggestion to navigate to what you typed. My address bar is not a Google search form, it's an address bar that happens to search on Google when I type something that's not a web address.
iOS 13.5.1
Maybe it was a bug in an earlier version that's been fixed, I don't do a whole lot of browsing on my phone. But that was (or still is) easily the most obnoxious browser bug in my recent memory.
You type in a url into a textbox, and then it gives you a hyperlink to that site.
So many people defend Apple's walled garden, and then they do things like this, be it on purpose or by accident.
What a mess.
Why is he demonstrating on random phones in an Apple store? That’s not really a good example of a ‘clean’, out of the box device.
A ton of people have tinkered with those phones. Isn’t it possible that some other people typed ‘realtor.com’ in all those phones in the past?
Either way it you type a specific, valid URL, it should never be overridden with an autocomplete.
BTW, been super pleased with the betas so far.
If I type a word, like "resolv" into the omnibar, it gives me the option to "search with google". Great. But if I type in "resolv.conf", it by default wants to "visit" (thinking .conf. is a tld)... but it doesn't even show me the option to "search with google" in the dropdown! I've literally had to resort to typing "google resolv.conf" which is a super gross way of going about it.
I don't know if combining search and URLs in one box was ever a good idea. I feel I preferred the dual-box layout, where you had a URL bar on the left and a search bar on the right.
macOS 10.15.5 Safari 13.1.1 Tested 4 configurations: Search engine: DDG vs Google Wipr adblock extension on/off.
In all four cases: Typed in realty.com and hit enter - got realty.com. Typed in sketch and hit enter - got search results for the word sketch.
Tested exact same configurations (DDG/Google, Wipr on/off) on my phone. iOS 13.5.1 on iPhone XR Same results as above.
I'm just not seeing the behaviour that's being described here. Perhaps its a geo thing? I'm in Australia. I assume most people here are in the US?
EDITED: Sorry, I just realised, I'm not sure if you meant you're seeing the same behaviour as me, or as everyone else.
These are super specific high value search terms. Apple is most definitely being paid to do this.
Low value target words just seem to go directly to google searches though.
After a couple repeated failures (where it went to realtor.com) I tried typing in http://realty.com (I forgot to use https fwiw) then it visited the real site realty.com and again went to that same real correct site on every subsequent attempt using just the bare string realty.com —- of course that’s too much to ask of users, nor would anyone have a chance to ask them.
Why the discrepancy?
One of the things I appreciateon my (default) phone setup (Android, Honor 8x, Firefox, DDG) is that when I type on the browser's URL/search the autocorrect is OFF. When I type in the DDF search form the autocorrect is ON.
I find this super logical (I keep suggestions off)
If Google can take money to sent people to a website that otherwise would rank below yours, Apple certainly isn’t liable for doing the same without intention.
I‘m not saying I know the US Code by heart or anything, but lacking the basic intuition for what the laws of the land are must be a terrible disadvantage.
But the reality is that with every release of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, piece by piece, the Web's most important behaviors and features, the things which make it so awesome, are being removed.
> That seems incredibly illegal.
Why would it be illegal? I understand that it's unfair, but what law would be broken here?
However, a bit unrelated, Siri suggested a website whose title is “Home - Donuts” when I was typing news.ycombinator. And the link for it is just “news”
- reality
- reality.com
- sketch
I tried with “Search Engine Suggestions” on and off, with the same results.
I couldn’t test with “Safari Suggestions”. The switch was disabled. I assume this is due to having Siri disabled.
On my iPhone I replaced the keyboard with SwiftKey b/c I kept making embarrassing mistakes with the default keyboard.
Does not replicate on Chrome or Firefox on the same phone
Tested on iPhone, Safari, iOS 13.5.1
The CAPTCHA is provided by Cloudflare and it’s up to the customer to chose to show it before access to the site since it can decrease spam and hug of deaths
https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157161487396...
Further it seems that it's adding an extra m on the end on all but the first.
EDIT: LOL, -10 on this post. This place is such a swamp of imbeciles. Again, this is 100% a DNS issue, and note that the majority do not have this. Verizon or some other specific provider is blocking what they see, incorrectly, as typosquatting. Guy tried zero Android devices in comparison. Probably because he knew all of the "HRURR EVIL APPLE MAKING MONEY REDIRECTING" sloths would run with it.
If not, they have no reason to fix it. You will get used to it, soon enough, and like every other offense, it will soon seem unremarkable.
The battered wife doesn't leave him because, she says, "I can still stand it."
If I hit space after 'realty.com', it would try a google search... but if i hit space and then delete the space, it would send me to realty.com
Super confusing... this is on iOS 13.3.1
The entry in safari is acting only as a search box it seems, and Go takes you to the first result that is finds - which is the first result on Google, likely a paid ad, or just coincidentally a higher ranking.
If you visit the realty.com site directly (Not suggesting this is a workaround, see thread), then type it in, Safari remembers it and gives it higher priority. This seems to be a quirk of a “first visit” UX - it still is meaningful to anyone who has competitors with similar names, and I’d call it a bug to not check the domain first, though assuming good intent, maybe it does, but something about that domain is not right for some heuristic (HSTS, something else?)
How? He literally types "realty.com" (ie: the full domain) in the bar and it goes to "realtor.com."
If you look at the list of items that appear below his typing, the “Top Hit” is “realtor.com” - I am saying that this is reading the typing as a search, and not as a domain. It’s a bug imo that the domain isn’t considered first.
I think it came across as if I’m saying this is correct behavior, I’m not, I’m saying it’s following the UX available, it’s not a nefarious trick to redirect to a competitor. It’s still damaging and needs to be fixed.
The second suggestion when typing `realty.com` was `Google search: realty.com`. Clicking on that took me directly to `realty.com`, which is also misleading because I was expecting to be taken to a list of Google results where I’d attempt to click on a link to `realty.com`.
Typing in `realty.com` works every time as expected after that.