A Bug to Crash Safari (and Chrome on iOS)

Hey guys, this is Macad 101, and today I'm going to be showing you a bug in both Safari on Mac and Chrome, and Safari on iOS, which allows me to crash your web browser or a tab in your web browser when you go to my site.

So, I accidentally found this problem while I was working on a legitimate site, the only application of group theory dot com. What happens is when I run a certain CSS animation or try to run it, and I just do it by clicking that button, the tab will actually crash, and it'll show you this crash error message.

So we know something actually did crash, and since Safari uses a separate process for every tab, the entire web browser didn't crash. But let me show you the same exact website on the iOS simulator. On iOS, this is what happens on an iPhone in Safari when you click the button.

So it goes, it presses down, and then Safari crashes. It would close all of your tabs that are open, and you would have to open it up and reload them, and whatever, and it crashes Safari just like that. This time you see Safari didn't even remember I was on the page because it crashed unexpectedly, so it didn't get to save that data.

It also crashes Chrome on iOS, and I assume a lot of the same problems occur internally there that causes them. Now, this is nice. I showed this bug to my friend, and he actually went ahead and he implemented something that does it when you load the web page.

So it doesn't even wait until you click a button like this one, it just straight up crashes your browser tab when you click the link. So here, I'll go, I'll click this link that he made, and it's on Twitter. It loads the tab, and it keeps trying to reload it, and eventually it gives up, shows me an error message, and there we go.

It says a problem repeatedly occurred, and it's the same bug I found that he re-implemented on load, which is really nice. So this is a very good display of an example of how I found a bug, and no one really responded to me finding the bug. I tweeted about it, whatever.

So it's up to you guys to basically get Apple to patch this because, as it is, if you're a Safari user, someone can link you to something on your phone that will just crash your mobile browser.

So anyway, go ahead. I'll have a link to this tweet in the description that my friend made that you can retweet to basically get the word out about this little Safari bug.

Thanks for watching Macad 101. Subscribe and goodbye!