Apple iPhone Safari Crasher (iPhone 4 & 4S, iOS 5.0.1) | Hacker News Reader

Apple iPhone Safari Crasher (iPhone 4 & 4S, iOS 5.0.1)

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10 pointsthefox23 comments

It appears to crash Google Chrome on Windows 7 as well, which makes me think that it's a problem with WebKit.

Firefox 3.6.3 was a little iffy with it and stopped responding several times, but did eventually pull through.

IE 9 did not appear to be adversely affected.

Chrome shows me the Oops, crashed tab. Does it crash the entire browser for you? (Windows XP, 15.0.874.120 m)

Surely that's what steverb means. That tab is describing a crash: the page renderer or javascript interpreter segfaulted. The user experience is obviously much better in Chrome because of the process sandboxing, but the bug is likely the same.

Yes. It just causes the single page to crash. The rest of my tabs are unaffected. I personally don't think this is a big deal, unless there were some way to execute evil code. It's not the first time I've had a page crash a Chrome tab.

Crashes my android phone as well.

Last time I checked, the easiest way to crash Safari was to copy the latest failing crash tests from the WebKit source repository.

Interesting, but it's really not that hard to crash Safari in iOS. We've had to redesign our web interfaces a couple of times to avoid endemic crashing.

In general, lots of images + lots of javascript + screen rotation = crash.

I too found that Mobile Safari on my 3GS using iOS 5 crashes quite often, and you don't need 100MB to do it. For example, the Tim O'Reilly Apple opinion on Google+ causes it to crash on a consistent basis (https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/g9WdNt6y...)

No kidding. Adding a single line of css is enough to crash it. Once I tried text-rendering: optimizeLegibility and iphone and ipad went kaboom!

Hm, I just tried it, but it didn't crash. What's the trick?

I don't know as it was over a month ago. Perhaps it is in combo with something else or a specific ios version. I do know that as soon as I added it kaboom, commented it, then back to normal.

To be fair, it crashed my Google Chrome 15.0.874.120 on a MacBook Pro. So it's not Apple iOS device specific. It's probably WebKit browser specific or even far more out reaching.

I don't know if it killed Safari or not, but after a couple of minutes of the beach ball I killed it.

Crashes Chrome, Firefox and WebKit nightly on Lion. I bet it will crash IE also.

Conclusion: most, if not all, browsers are not prepared to handle a 100 MB HTML document. If all the file does is crash the browser, who cares? If it can be exploited, then we should be worried.

Is the OP trying to be sensationalist or did he/she simply not test on other browsers?

Nope. It's the "data:text/html;" in <a> link. If I don't use this, Safari on iPhone don't crash.

So why the 100mb?

100mb combined with "data:text/html;".

It crashed for me on Google Chrome for Windows too. Ran it through WinDbg and looks like it is just an out of memory error causing an breakpoint.

What were you expecting it to do? It's a mobile device and you are downloading 100 MB of inline data into RAM. Doesn't seem like much of a problem to me unless you are implying that there is an exploit potential.

I'm sure some while(1) JavaScrip would be a lot easier...

This won't crash most modern browsers.

This doesn't seem to crash in IE10, but I can't right-click on the page to view source, so perhaps the child process is frozen or otherwise isolated from causing harm.

Firefox Nightly on Linux lags, but it works.

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