I’d left Safari for Firefox (technically Minefield) because of an incredibly frustrating little bug, which I described in an earlier post:
I’ve experienced an issue where cookies seem to get clobbered despite selecting the “keep me logged in” option, and I’ll find that I’ve been suddenly logged out of the site I was on.
A few people had recommended removing any Web Clip dashboard widgets, but I didn’t have any installed. Instead, my solution was to move to Firefox and hang out there until Apple figured things out.
Firefox on Mac OS X isn’t as bad as the kids say, really, especially if you use Minefield (the nightly build), which is quite a bit faster. But even at its best, Firefox always seems just a little bit clunkier on the Mac, even if it does render pages really quickly.
No matter though, because it seems that Security Update 2009-001 fixes the Safari cookie issue:
This update addresses a non-security regression introduced in Mac OS X 10.5.6. Cookies may not be properly set if a web site attempts to set a session cookie by supplying a null value in the “expires” field, rather than omitting the field. This update addresses the issue by ignoring the “expires” field if it has a null value.
Developers often use cookies to verify that you’ve been successfully logged in to a website, and sometimes set empty an expires field values so you can remain logged in for an extended period of time. The problem seemed to occur because Safari was picky about how developers created the cookie. If they used a null value instead of just omitting the field, there’d be trouble.
I can verify that the fix worked on all of the Macs I’d had an issue with, so it may be worth a shot if you’re still experiencing Safari-related cookie issues.
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tayker
23 February 2009 at 7:35 am
If you want Firefox with a Safari feel, this site has a great FF theme: http://takebacktheweb.org/
Morgan Roderick
23 February 2009 at 7:38 am
Dan, thanks for sharing the info.
I am still experiencing the issue, even though I have installed Security Update 2009-001, so maybe the fixes contained herein does not target all the sources of the issue.
I suspect that 1Password is also to blame for some of the occurrences of this issue, but have yet to figure out how to verify or dismiss this suspicion.
I do, however, find Firefox on OS X quite bad ... but perhaps Minefield might deliver a pleasant (and consistant) browsing experience.
I’ll post something in the comments on this thread, if I manage to find the source of the issue.
Richard Henry
23 February 2009 at 9:05 am
@TAYKER: Sort of looks like Safari, but doesn’t feel like Safari.
Anthony James Bruno
23 February 2009 at 9:25 am
Thats great news! Problem is I have switched to Firefox and I dont think im going back.
robmandu
23 February 2009 at 9:59 am
I’ve seen the same thing in Chrome, most notably on Twitter. Any chance this is really a WebKit issue?
Mr. Darcy
23 February 2009 at 10:25 am
Sadly I cannot confirm the fix either. I still experience the problem on quite a number of web pages. No 1Password here … :(
(And for me Firefox isn’t a real option either.)
Luke Redpath
23 February 2009 at 11:08 am
I put up with this for quite a while before caving in and moving over to Firefox and I have to say I agree, it’s not as bad as Firefox 2 was and with various add-ons like the great delicious addon and adblocker plus, I have to say I’m tempted to stick with Firefox.
daragh
23 February 2009 at 4:29 pm
Safari needs a reopen last closed tab shortcut (Cmd.+Shift+T works well on Firefox), location bar quicksearches instead of the outmoded search bar, Greasemonkey-like user scripting, and AdBlock; without having to resort to input managers that constantly break stuff.
I would totally jump ship from Firefox if a Cocoa browser offered these. Also, it’d be great if more browsers that offer session resume would use NetNewsWire’s style of open tab reloading, as in the tabs from the previous session are only reloaded when they are given focus. This would prevent the massive resources grab that happens when I reopen Firefox and want to resume my previous session that apparently had a lot of open tabs.
Brian
23 February 2009 at 5:38 pm
I can’t fathom how anyone could choose Firefox over Safari. I guess that is just me, but I vastly prefer Safari, especially when searching text on a page, and for the bookmark flexibility. ALso, just the overall look and speed—definitely a huge advantage for Safari.
Morgan Roderick
24 February 2009 at 3:44 am
For Safari users that are fed up with slow loading flash banners, there is hope: http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master
I don’t mind seeing advertising as long as it’s relevant, but most of the flash advertising is appallingly bad, and is being served from overloaded servers.
Makes my Safari experience a little happier :-)
Am tempted to use Camino though, as the cookies issue is getting really annoying.