Leopard 10.5.0 problem spots

2:10 pm
Leopard, Software Review

I’ve been using Leopard as my only OS for 4+ days now. Here is a first report on where I’ve encountered the most problems.

Safari:

I spend a lot of time with Safari (can’t use any other browser as my main browser). It’s the only Apple application that I use so extensively. So far I’ve noticed few thing:

  1. It crashes way more than previous versions of Safari. I guess they’re using a code-base almost completely different from the beta 3.0 version that they released for Tiger. The beta Tiger version was almost bulletproof for me. I’ve had unexplained crashes so far at least twice per day. Most of the crashes happened when I started typing in a form.
  2. It seems to be unable to block certain type of popup windows. I have the ‘Block pop up windows’ preference set, and yet I’ve had two or three instances where websites managed to show me some ads in a popup window. Not good.
  3. Visual glitches: A site I visited changed the size of my main Safari window to a really small size and then back to full-screen. After the expansion to full size, the tabs bar got clipped and only a third of its normal hight showed. I couldn’t get it back to normal size without quitting Safari. (side note: I wish Safari had a resize blocking feature like Camino. I just hate it when a stupid website decides that my window size is not adequate for its display and ‘helps’ me by changing the size of my browser window).
  4. Scripting: Apple changed the behavior of some AppleScript commands. The ‘open’ command used to open a new window with the URL, now it opens it in a tab. The kicker is that Safari doesn’t seem to respond to ‘make new window’ command. (I’ve worked around this one by modifying my code to anticipate a new tab instead of a new window and acts accordingly.)
  5. Spontaneous cookie loss: It has happened few times already. I would be surfing and managing my various websites, (most of my websites rely on cookies for log in), and suddenly, I would be logged out. I looked over cookies and most of the cookies weren’t there. They simply vanished. Not all cookies, just some. I have no clue how to track this bug.
  6. Web clippings don’t work: I’ve tested the Web Clip feature and it doesn’t seem to work. When I make a clip of a page, it appears correctly in Dashboard, but whenever I reload the Dashboard, the clip is empty. I tried it with various sites with the same result.

Folder Actions:

To show my geeky side, one of Leopard’s features that I anticipated the most is the enhancements to the Folder Actions engine. In Tiger, if you had multiple folders with folder actions, those actions don’t run concurrently. They run back to back. So if folder 1 fires its action and it takes a while to complete, folder 2 won’t fire its action until folder 1’s action ends. Leopard’s feature list promised to fix this.

However, not only they didn’t fix it, a bug seems to have broken Folder Actions further. Now, even if I have multiple folders with folder actions set up, only the first active one works. All the other ones don’t work at all. So now I have to choose which folder action I can live without and which ones are too crucial.

8 Responses

  1. has Says:

    “The kicker is that Safari doesn’t seem to respond to ‘make new window’ command.”

    While Safari’s new tab elements are very welcome, its scripting support remains somewhat illogical/inconsistent/inadequate in other respects. For now you need to ask it to create a new document:


    tell application "Safari" to make new document with properties {URL:"http://bugreport.apple.com"}

    HTH

    has

    http://appscript.sourceforge.net
    http://rb-appscript.rubyforge.org

  2. Douglas Says:

    I had the same “web clips” problem, but a Google search turned up this discussion, the proposed solution in which worked for me. Your results may vary.

    http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/352114/web-clips-explain-em-me-like/

  3. David Says:

    I also get more browser crashes in Safari–many more, and the same thing is happening with Firefox.

  4. Kasper Says:

    My Safari crashes almost every day… :-( What the heck is going on? Was much more stable in earlier versions of 10.4.x. I’m getting very very tired of this…

  5. Fred Says:

    I’ve been using Camino (Mozilla associated) for my web browsing for years and tend to prefer it.

    http://caminobrowser.org/

  6. Melanie Says:

    I’ve come across the folder action glitch also. Is there any way around this?

  7. Lazeez Says:

    Yes, there is a workaround for the problem.

    First save the AppleScript as an Application.

    Second, use the program ‘Lingon’ to create a user launchd event that runs the script (saved as application) whenever the watched folder is modified.
    Log out and log back in and it should work.

    The launchd event works better than folder actions.

    Although, crossing fingers, the soon-to-be-released update 10.5.3 would fix the problem.

  8. Melanie Says:

    Thanks, Lazeez. I ended up doing something similar by creating an applet that scans the target folder and runs my desired applescript if anything is found. I set them to launch when the user logs in, so it works pretty well.

    I’ll check into “Lingon” also. It sounds like that’ll be a good tool for the tool box.

    I’d cross my fingers and toes to have this problem fixed. What a pain.

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