A large number of users are reporting a strange bug that is affecting Safari browser on iOS and Mac OS. For most of the users, the crash occurs immediately as soon as the address-bar is tapped. This crash issue is reporteadly linked with Safari’s ‘Suggestions’ feature.
Apple is yet to confirm this issue from its end. But for now, turning off Suggestions feature in Safari is resolving the issue. To disable Suggestions feature on your iPhone or iPad, go into Settings > Safari, and turn off Safari Suggestions.
On a Mac, you can turn off Suggestions feature by navigating to Safari > Preferences > Search and turning off ‘Include Search Engine Suggestions’ and ‘Include Safari Suggestions’ options. Another way of getting rid of Safari crash issue is to use Private Browsing feature of Safari.
It should be noted that these are just workarounds until Apple confirms and resolves this issue.
As soon as the issue started crashing Safari, users started complaining about the same on Twitter, Reddit and the official Apple forum.
is anyone else's safari crashing whenever u try to enter smth in the bar on iphone
— brenda (@brendamao) January 27, 2016
https://twitter.com/jonofthesouth/status/692270877426225153
https://twitter.com/chickenfajita_/status/692275151749173248
Merely tapping the address bar on iOS 9.x crashes Safari right now
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) January 27, 2016
Safari Crash: Scope of the Issue
The crash issue is currently being reported by users of iOS 9.2.1 and iOS 9.2 on all devices worldwide. According to comments made by users on Reddit, Safari running on iOS 9.3 beta is also affected by the same. My personal iPhone running iOS 9.0.2 doesn’t seem to be affected by this nasty bug though.
Safari Crash: What’s the Reason Behind This Issue?
The crash issue is related to Suggestions feature of Safari. When you start typing in the address-bar, Safari sends the input to Apple’s servers to return a response which includes suggestions, auto complete search queries and top sites with other information. There seems to be a server side issue with Apple’s Suggestions service which is causing Safari to crash upon typing anything in the address-bar.
As stated earlier, Apple is yet to confirm the exact cause of this issue.
Safari Crash: Unrelated to crashsafari.com (do not follow)
It is worth nothing that since last two days, links to a prank site called Crashsafari were widely being spread on social media. Upon following the site on a web browser including Safari, it caused an immediate crash. The site caused iPhones to reboot when visited. Today’s issue however, is unrelated to Crashsafari.
Are you experiencing the Safari crash issue? Share your device model and iOS version.
Any updates will be added here as they take place.
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