Thursday, June 01, 2017

Safari: A problem occurred with this webpage so it was reloaded (Update)

After filing an initial bug and reaching out to some Apple developers, Apple has been able to
reproduce the problems causing these crashes in Safari, here is the list of bugs filed which
reproduce the cryptic error message "A problem occurred with this webpage so it was reloaded"

Out of memory crash with MapBox-gl-js

Camera/Canvas file input crash: A Problem Occurred with this Webpage so it was Reloaded

Pinch zoom crash: A problem occurred with this web page so it was reloaded

Page that allocates and destroys canvas elements in a loop gets jettisoned on iOS

It does somewhat concern me that after trawling thru github, I found lots of developers battling these
problems but nobody had bothered to report the issue back to the webkit bug tracker (radar is simply
a black hole from the late 20th century).

By default iOS has reporting analytics turned off, which may be the reason why these kind of
problems have been occurring for years without being resolved.

The crash logs on iOS for these bugs indicate it's an out of memory, aka Memory leak/GC problem,
but they only include a list of processes and doesn't even seem to include the url of the page which
triggered the crash.

Maybe does Apple get more detailed crash reports, but from an outside perspective it seems they
don't and it's their users and web developers who are suffering as a result.