Safari URLs fail to load

March 8, 2005 10:01 AM

Stoopid Safari question: URLs often only load on the second try. I type in the URL, hit enter, the URL disappears, no page loads, any URL that was there before reappears.

Usually occurs with auto-complete URLs replacing an URL already in the address field. It's not this DNS issue. I cleaned out caches, deleted the history, deleted the favicons, repaired permissions, and a bunch of other stuff. I have Saft 7.5, Sogudi 4.5 and PithHelmet latest installed.

posted by Mo Nickels to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Don't feel too stoopid, I've noticed this as well and am interested in the fix. I've always just dismissed it as "one of those things".
posted by aladfar at 10:07 AM on March 8, 2005

What OS are you using?

All I can add is that this is familiar because it *used* to happen to me a couple months ago and then it just went away. I'm not clear on what change I made however. I did upgrade the OS (now at 10.3.8) but thats all I can think of.
posted by vacapinta at 10:43 AM on March 8, 2005

I'm on 10.3.8.
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:55 AM on March 8, 2005

Does the same thing happen when you don't have those three behavior-altering plug-ins installed? I've never used Sogudi, but Saft & PithHelmet make *major* changes to Safari as far as I've seen.
posted by bcwinters at 10:59 AM on March 8, 2005

Interestingly enough, the Return key doesn't work at all in the address field without the add-ons installed, nor does the Delete key. The return key works in Google to activate a search, but the delete key doesn't work there, nor in this very text area I am typing right now. Very annoying. Let me see what I can do with theis new info.
posted by Mo Nickels at 11:17 AM on March 8, 2005

I don't know that this is the problem, but Saft and PithHelmet definitely don't play well together. There's a message to this effect on the Saft download page, under the Saft v7.5.1 heading. I tried running both a few weeks ago, had problems, and decided to stick with PithHelmet for now.
posted by Acetylene at 11:32 AM on March 8, 2005

The canonical suggestion for this problem is to go into the Network preferences panel and turn off IPv6.
posted by kindall at 11:34 AM on March 8, 2005

Really, kindall? New one on me. Do you have a link to more info? Seems strange.

Acetylene, a couple of weeks ago I reverted back to the old version of Saft which does not have the compatability problem with PithHelmet after the Saft developer made it clear he wasn't interested in allowing people to turn off the mixed-character-set-URL-spoofing detector which is causing the problem.
posted by Mo Nickels at 11:38 AM on March 8, 2005

I had the same problem for a while. I don't recall exactly what I did to make it go away, but I remember reading that it was a bug that Apple introduced with a system update or security update (I think this was discussed on Macintouch).

Right now I do have IPv6 on "automatic", and I'm not having the problem--go figure. I have neither Pith Helmet nor Saft installed. I'd give Kindall's advice a shot. Possibly just running the latest batch of security updates will fix it, if you haven't done that in a while.
posted by adamrice at 11:50 AM on March 8, 2005

I'm not entirely sure where I read it, actually. I switched to OmniWeb, though, and haven't had the problem lately.
posted by kindall at 12:05 PM on March 8, 2005

I use Saft and PithHelmet also. I've been having this problem recently, and it definitely started around when I installed Saft. It never happened to me prior. It's possible it was related to something else (like a security update), but Saft is definitely the top suspect.

I'd try removing Saft for a while. If you're more attached to Saft than PithHelmet, you could try removing PithHelmet... It's possible it's a conflict rather than a bug solely with Saft.

It doesn't happen to me too often thankfully, but it is annoying.
posted by robotspacer at 1:11 PM on March 8, 2005

I remember this used to happen to me too- but it fixed itself. It appears that osX used to time out too quickly on DNS requests, but that the second time you clicked on a link or hit enter, it was picking the DNS server's reply to the first query....or something. I highly recommend searching and then posting to Apple's Support Forums
good luck
MK
posted by michaelkuznet at 7:09 PM on March 8, 2005

Turning off IPv6 fixed the problem for me, when I had it. I don't know what the underlying bug is, but the fix really does work.

I encountered a similar issue when using privoxy locally; apparently setting the proxy to "localhost" rather than "127.0.0.1" is another source of this issue, due to a bug in Apple's DNS resolver. Non-local proxies, by the way, can still be referred to by name without incident.
posted by majick at 7:57 PM on March 8, 2005