This has been driving me mad for the better part of a year: the autocomplete behavior in Safari is totally broken. Last year it started picking words from your query and going through your history and using that to autocomplete so you'd always go to some random thing from your history that's barely relevant even for the most generic search terms (if I type "ptrace" I want to go to a web search, not some random Stack Overflow question I clicked on two years ago that happened to have "ptrace" in its title). Now it's randomly loading other websites I have never been to when I type search terms (I searched "sketch" the other day and it took me to "sketchers.com"). It's WWDC week, so FB7333211 for the first one and another incoming once I can reproduce this reliably. Please fix your stuff, Apple.
Oh, while I'm here: trying to escape out of the autocomplete suggestion is also awful, it's some sort of combination of ⎋ and ⌫ and the arrow keys until you can get the thing to not show up in the bar, and then you have to look very closely to make sure that it's not going to send you to the Top Hit anyways.
Folks who can reproduce the "sketch" --> "sketchers.com" behavior or the "realty.com" --> "realtor.com" behavior, would any of you be willing to file the issue via Feedback Assistant (only needs a free developer.apple.com account) with a sysdiagnose and a screen recording? Then give me the FB number.
I can get the Safari team to look at this, but I can't reproduce either behavior myself. Any other examples of bogus/unexpected autocomplete also welcome.
I looked at the FB# cited in the parent, but it doesn't have a specific example or a sysdiagnose. Since may of these things only reproduce for some users, we need all the data we can get to resolve these issues.
> I searched "sketch" the other day and it took me to "sketchers.com"
I got curious and tried the same, with the same results. And I have never before bought shoes online, ever.
But it's even worse than you said: the website is actually "skechers.com", with no t. So, when you type "sketch", Safari is guessing that you're misspelling the name of a shoe retailer.
Reading through yours and the other comments here...I just can't even understand...who came up with the idea of changing key word searches into autocompleting URLs? Personally, I still find the idea of a URL bar doubling as a search bar a bit disconcerting as it is. I expect specific behaviour from a URL bar. I type in an address and either it takes me to what I type or it can't find it.
This behaviour everyone's describing from safari would fill me with so much rage. That shit would drive me nuts. Having non existent addresses being interpreted as search queries is annoying enough, if my browser started deciding my searches were random web addresses I'd lose my shit.
Holy cow, yes. I switched to FF a while back, and your description of the behavior alone raised my blood pressure. They way return automatically opens whatever the first suggestion is immensely frustrating. The way hitting `return` is literally a race condition against how quickly the autocomplete returns its results.
There are some things I miss about Safari, but the search bar behavior is not one of them.
> the autocomplete behavior in Safari is totally broken.
I'm looking for a genuine honest answer here, this really isn't rhetorical. Every second thread regarding Apple seems to have top comments complaining about the quality of what Apple has become. The first I recall was the butterfly keyboard fiasco, then some others, then El Capitan and Big Sur bugs, then this.
Again, I really want to understand this: why the continued loyalty?
My phone's language and my native language are different. Oftentimes it'll recommend me an English wikipedia article while typing (which is fine). But whenever I select it, it fails, since an article with the same title as the English wikipedia doesn't exist in the phone's language. Why are the recommendations in the language I'm typing, but the links it follows through with defaulting to the phone's language? It's slightly bizarre.
Turn off "Include search engine suggestions" in the search pane of the Safari preferences.
You’ll still get autocomplete from your own history (requiring you to press backspace before return to get a web search), but at least it won’t arbitrarily send you to sites you have never visited before.
Thats rediculous, and theres plenty of other equally undermining things technology does these days. When did technologists get so arrogant to think they should implement these things? I dont want my computer to think or make decisions for me, just get better at doing what I say.
This drives me nuts too. I search for “COVID Tokyo news” and it takes me to a government website (https://stopcovid19.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/en/), when what I want to do is see all the latest news indexed by google.
I am so glad that someone else hates this as much as I do. I stick with Safari because I like the password manager and the power performance, but the search bar is just completely nonfunctional. God forbid I ever even _think_ of a word that contains the letters "sch", because Safari will then forever navigate to some website containing that word instead of Schwab.com, which I navigate to multiple times a day.
I’m under the impression that there’s also some timing bug going on. Pressing enter too soon sometime leaves me with a filled in address field (no focus anymore) but also a blank page. I need to cmd+L, wait, enter again before firing off the query. Running into this occasionally on powerful hardware as well. Maybe because I’m in EU and roundtrip to US takes a while?
I’ve gotten into the habit of hitting the space bar after entering the query but before hitting enter. Seems to work fine at preventing erroneously bringing up the browser history.
> This has been driving me mad for the better part of a year
Also here - I quit using desktop Safari just for this reason.
I could write a full URL, press enter, and Safari would take me to a different page on a different website from my history.
It then seems almost impossible to reach the URL I wanted. I got into the habit of copying the URL to the clipboard in case I needed to re-try, or use another browser.
(This doesn't appear to be happening to me right now)
Apple's iOS autocomplete ain't much to write home about either, to be honest. One of my biggest gripes with the iPhone is when it freakin' turns something I spelled correctly into a wholly different word, and it does it ALL the damn time.
Just the other day I typed in the name of a company I wanted to find a product number for “foobar inc”, and I end up getting sent to their YouTube channel by Google :(
Have a tab open that is changing its title on an interval.
Try to type something in any tabs address bar and use the arrow or a mouse to try and pick a result, the focus will constant jump and reset to the beginning every time the title changes on any tab, making it nearly impossible to pick a result if its changing fast enough.
The auto complete list seems to be populated with web page titles in real time and the list is being modified causing the results to be rerendered.
I found this after trying to use a Super Micro IPMI that updates the title with the current FPS on every frame, had it in a background tab and couldn't get to a search result, oh the frustration and time that cost me to actually track down.
I just tried this on Safari on my phone - I was sent to Realtor.com as well. I tried it a few times and was redirected each time, even though I typed "realty.com" in the URL bar (and it didn't auto-correct before I hit "Go").
Safari is the absolute worst web browser by far. Both mobile and desktop.
This kind of egregious error is only the most obvious part.
Try doing a WebRTC conference call in Safari. Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Jitsi Meet, etc, etc, etc. None of them support Safari. Do you know why? It's because Safari is absolutely riddled with bugs: [1][2][3].
I think this is symptomatic of the really overzealous approach that Apple has towards autocomplete and autocorrect these days. The autocorrect has a nasty habit of replacing my correct sentences containing absolutely normal non-technical vocabulary with annoyingly incorrect garbage. It routinely replaces “well” with “we’ll” when it makes absolutely no sense to do so, and generally adds apostrophes all over the place. Not to mention the way it handles names. Sometimes I want my name to not be capitalised, such as in my email address. Even pressing backspace, then typing the same thing in again after it autocorrects incorrectly doesn’t solve anything.
I received my new American Express and, when trying to enter the URL on the sticker, Safari suggested a phishing site as the "top result". I tried reporting this to both Apple and AMEX but never received a response :(
I just typed realty.com into OSX Safari 13.1.1 and got the proper site. Then when I picked up my iPhone (ios 13.5) and started to do the same test it autocompleted 'real' into 'realty.com'.
On the OSX side, the 'search' pane of settings has Safar Suggestions and Quick Website Search on, has preload top hit and show favorites off, and has DDG as the search. On IOS I have DDG as the search, and have Search Engine Suggestions, Safari Suggestions, and Quick Website Search on, and Preload Top Hit off. And have Frequently Visited Sites off.
It is worth mentioning that OSX Safari offered 'realtor.com' as a 'Top Hit' suggestion below the address bar, which I could have chosen with a quick downarrow, return, but at no point did it try to fill in autocomplete for me.
I almost wonder if this is happening to the owner of realty.com because they have spent a lot of time looking at realtor.com while building a site that competes with it, and Safari now thinks this is a site they really love to go to. — EDIT. Oh no I missed the part where there are videos of this being done on demo iPhones at the Apple store. Crazy! And not good.
Url editing on iphone safari is highly messed up experience ... the text selection and editing behavior is just broken since ios 12 or 11 -- whichever one introduced the new text selection model ...
My standard easy repro -- go to a long url and try to edit the second to last segment of the url path (something which i do for work frequently when folks send me links to projects under development).
I've run into a similar problem on the Mac version of Safari for a while now:
I'll paste in a full (http:// or https://) URL and hit Enter, but instead of loading the requested URL it just reloads the current page. I sometimes have to paste it a couple times before it will actually load the URL I want.
Anyone else encountered this or am I just going crazy?
You are not crazy. There is a bug in the last 2 minor releases of Safari where you can type in or paste a link and it'll just end up reloading the same page. You can do this several times. It drives me mad, quite honestly. But it is indeed a bug. No idea why. I doubt it's related to this suggestion feature.
Ah so I’m not going crazy. These things are just... the type of bug that indicates a deeper issue in the code. Poor software engineering decisions, and many of them.
Mobile Safari had a bug for a year where the zoom function would get stuck somehow, breaking rendering completely. I wonder how that happened too.
I have this problem too. I've been searching for others having the same issue for forever and this is the first time I've seen any mention of it. I submitted feedback to Apple with a screen recording but nothing ever came of that.
It seems like it has something to do with the cadence of when I press the return key while it's loading suggestions into the autocomplete dropdown. It's almost as if pressing return is selecting an item that isn't in the dropdown list yet. If I paste a URL and wait a second or two I never have that problem. It's when I'm moving quickly that I frequently run into it.
Alright, while we’re talking about iOS autocomplete - I have a question. I noticed that sometimes when I’m typing an out-of-dictionary word, sometimes the keyboard will actually type the key next to the key I tapped that would type a real word. I imagine they’ve put a lot of effort into making the touch keyboard accurate, so is this a feature to that end or, more likely, is it a Baader-Meinhof thing, that I only notice when it happens?
I always felt like I was the only one that experienced this. Even worse, I think sometimes it highlights the character you actually want, but once you release your finger it inserts something else. It happens very rarely but I remember I had to retype a character 5 or 6 times at one point, thinking I was going mad.
I just moved to android and this bugs the shit out of me. It’s definitely real. I had to retype a character once by using the side of the key farthest from the one it was touch jacking.
File a bug report on https://webkit.org/reporting-bugs/. Unlike the apple bug reporter where it goes into an abyss and might be years before a resolution or even a reply, with the webkit reporting system I usually get a response from apple employees very quickly and majority of the items fixed in the next release or two.
What really drives me mad is that there is no public bugreporting for any Apple soft, except for the betas obviously.
Only then we'd be able to have an idea of the sheer extent of bugginess of their products, and how the heavily advertised features never work. I hope someone with energy and time actually creates and maintains an open, alternative bugzilla for that purpose specifically.
Have you tried typing 'form/multipart' into your firefox url bar? I expect a google search - what I get is a redirect to `https://form.com/multipart` - what?!
I've noticed that Safari on iOS autocompletes so aggressively that if you go to a full URL on a site (e.g. https://example.com/somesection/page.html) you can pretty much no longer type just "example.com" into the address bar. It will pretty damn aggressively autofill in the URL to the page you visited earlier.
Maybe it was a bug in an earlier version that's been fixed, I don't do a whole lot of browsing on my phone. But that was (or still is) easily the most obnoxious browser bug in my recent memory.
Safari's latest version has added some asynchronous coding that has impact behavior of the browser in negative ways. If you type the first part of a URL and there are multiple options so you use down arrow to get to the one that you want, a lot of times, the list is still being populated and Safari will jump the cursor back up to the top of the list. I think this is part of that same bad coding.
I can't replicate on the iOS beta or the MacOS beta for realty.com. For "sketch" - first result Safari shows is sketchup.google.com but it shows Skechers.com as a choice.
[+] [-] saagarjha|5 years ago|reply
Oh, while I'm here: trying to escape out of the autocomplete suggestion is also awful, it's some sort of combination of ⎋ and ⌫ and the arrow keys until you can get the thing to not show up in the bar, and then you have to look very closely to make sure that it's not going to send you to the Top Hit anyways.
[+] [-] om2|5 years ago|reply
Folks who can reproduce the "sketch" --> "sketchers.com" behavior or the "realty.com" --> "realtor.com" behavior, would any of you be willing to file the issue via Feedback Assistant (only needs a free developer.apple.com account) with a sysdiagnose and a screen recording? Then give me the FB number.
I can get the Safari team to look at this, but I can't reproduce either behavior myself. Any other examples of bogus/unexpected autocomplete also welcome.
I looked at the FB# cited in the parent, but it doesn't have a specific example or a sysdiagnose. Since may of these things only reproduce for some users, we need all the data we can get to resolve these issues.
[+] [-] impendia|5 years ago|reply
I got curious and tried the same, with the same results. And I have never before bought shoes online, ever.
But it's even worse than you said: the website is actually "skechers.com", with no t. So, when you type "sketch", Safari is guessing that you're misspelling the name of a shoe retailer.
[+] [-] grawprog|5 years ago|reply
This behaviour everyone's describing from safari would fill me with so much rage. That shit would drive me nuts. Having non existent addresses being interpreted as search queries is annoying enough, if my browser started deciding my searches were random web addresses I'd lose my shit.
[+] [-] andrewksl|5 years ago|reply
There are some things I miss about Safari, but the search bar behavior is not one of them.
[+] [-] zamalek|5 years ago|reply
I'm looking for a genuine honest answer here, this really isn't rhetorical. Every second thread regarding Apple seems to have top comments complaining about the quality of what Apple has become. The first I recall was the butterfly keyboard fiasco, then some others, then El Capitan and Big Sur bugs, then this.
Again, I really want to understand this: why the continued loyalty?
[+] [-] fiblye|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|5 years ago|reply
You’ll still get autocomplete from your own history (requiring you to press backspace before return to get a web search), but at least it won’t arbitrarily send you to sites you have never visited before.
[+] [-] ssss11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostpepper|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if there's some other setting I've changed that causes this difference in behaviour though.
[+] [-] el_benhameen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bouke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkteflon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackhaz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learnstats2|5 years ago|reply
Also here - I quit using desktop Safari just for this reason.
I could write a full URL, press enter, and Safari would take me to a different page on a different website from my history.
It then seems almost impossible to reach the URL I wanted. I got into the habit of copying the URL to the clipboard in case I needed to re-try, or use another browser.
(This doesn't appear to be happening to me right now)
[+] [-] throwanem|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apofis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chooseaname|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SigmundA|5 years ago|reply
Have a tab open that is changing its title on an interval.
Try to type something in any tabs address bar and use the arrow or a mouse to try and pick a result, the focus will constant jump and reset to the beginning every time the title changes on any tab, making it nearly impossible to pick a result if its changing fast enough.
The auto complete list seems to be populated with web page titles in real time and the list is being modified causing the results to be rerendered.
I found this after trying to use a Super Micro IPMI that updates the title with the current FPS on every frame, had it in a background tab and couldn't get to a search result, oh the frustration and time that cost me to actually track down.
Reported it to Apple of course nothing.
[+] [-] jameshawkins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VWWHFSfQ|5 years ago|reply
This kind of egregious error is only the most obvious part.
Try doing a WebRTC conference call in Safari. Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, Jitsi Meet, etc, etc, etc. None of them support Safari. Do you know why? It's because Safari is absolutely riddled with bugs: [1][2][3].
It is incredible how bad Safari is.
[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211181
[2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212669
[3] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212780
[+] [-] noodlesUK|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cglong|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|5 years ago|reply
On the OSX side, the 'search' pane of settings has Safar Suggestions and Quick Website Search on, has preload top hit and show favorites off, and has DDG as the search. On IOS I have DDG as the search, and have Search Engine Suggestions, Safari Suggestions, and Quick Website Search on, and Preload Top Hit off. And have Frequently Visited Sites off.
It is worth mentioning that OSX Safari offered 'realtor.com' as a 'Top Hit' suggestion below the address bar, which I could have chosen with a quick downarrow, return, but at no point did it try to fill in autocomplete for me.
I almost wonder if this is happening to the owner of realty.com because they have spent a lot of time looking at realtor.com while building a site that competes with it, and Safari now thinks this is a site they really love to go to. — EDIT. Oh no I missed the part where there are videos of this being done on demo iPhones at the Apple store. Crazy! And not good.
[+] [-] breatheoften|5 years ago|reply
My standard easy repro -- go to a long url and try to edit the second to last segment of the url path (something which i do for work frequently when folks send me links to projects under development).
Enjoy the frustration.
[+] [-] nodamage|5 years ago|reply
I'll paste in a full (http:// or https://) URL and hit Enter, but instead of loading the requested URL it just reloads the current page. I sometimes have to paste it a couple times before it will actually load the URL I want.
Anyone else encountered this or am I just going crazy?
[+] [-] scarlac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toxik|5 years ago|reply
Mobile Safari had a bug for a year where the zoom function would get stuck somehow, breaking rendering completely. I wonder how that happened too.
[+] [-] danphilibin|5 years ago|reply
It seems like it has something to do with the cadence of when I press the return key while it's loading suggestions into the autocomplete dropdown. It's almost as if pressing return is selecting an item that isn't in the dropdown list yet. If I paste a URL and wait a second or two I never have that problem. It's when I'm moving quickly that I frequently run into it.
[+] [-] doersino|5 years ago|reply
Typing a space at the end of the URL and waiting a second before hitting enter seems to circumvent this issue.
[+] [-] jdelStrother|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottjg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjeli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smitop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vultour|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nbardy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavymark|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromka|5 years ago|reply
Only then we'd be able to have an idea of the sheer extent of bugginess of their products, and how the heavily advertised features never work. I hope someone with energy and time actually creates and maintains an open, alternative bugzilla for that purpose specifically.
[+] [-] callamdelaney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grimmdude|5 years ago|reply
iOS 13.5.1
[+] [-] sli|5 years ago|reply
Maybe it was a bug in an earlier version that's been fixed, I don't do a whole lot of browsing on my phone. But that was (or still is) easily the most obnoxious browser bug in my recent memory.
[+] [-] recursive|5 years ago|reply
You type in a url into a textbox, and then it gives you a hyperlink to that site.
[+] [-] dhosek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixpulvis|5 years ago|reply
So many people defend Apple's walled garden, and then they do things like this, be it on purpose or by accident.
What a mess.
[+] [-] 40four|5 years ago|reply
Why is he demonstrating on random phones in an Apple store? That’s not really a good example of a ‘clean’, out of the box device.
A ton of people have tinkered with those phones. Isn’t it possible that some other people typed ‘realtor.com’ in all those phones in the past?
Either way it you type a specific, valid URL, it should never be overridden with an autocomplete.
[+] [-] 013a|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdeibele|5 years ago|reply
BTW, been super pleased with the betas so far.