Summary
Recently a number of bugs affecting our Safari extension have been introduced with various Safari 18.X updates. We've submitted feedback for all of these, but most have received no response. We need to raise this to your attention as it has been affecting our developer experience and causing a lot of frustration for our users. It's something that adds a lot of uncertainty for us. These issues affect core web functionalities but seem to be isolated to the Start Page or Extension environments.
For example:
- using window.open, no longer works
- using window.location.href = ... no longer works
- Including a <title> tag in our start page causes infinite reloading to occur.
- registering a content script more than once will crash Safari
Details
Unable to open new window as as start page extension in Safari 18
FB15879470
What happens: Calling window.open does nothing. This broke our links to our feedback submission, marketing site & help site.
When: Nov 18, 2024 - Initial launch of Safari 18 on macOS
Status: Open, No response
Unable to open app url scheme with window.location.href in start page extension in iOS 18
FB15879596
What happens: Changing the URL in this way does nothing (well actually it does work about 10% of the time). This broke our navigation to in app payment.
When: Nov 18, 2024 - Initial launch of Safari 18 on iOS
Status: Open, No response
New tab extensions broken
FB16126043
What happens: Having a <title> tag in your <head> causes an infinite loop of reloading the start page. This broke our entire start page extension.
When: Dec 19, 2024 - Safari 18.3 on iOS beta
Status: 10 similar tickets found, marked for future OS update. We did get a response and a fix is identified for a future release
window.open opens “about:blank” when called from Start Page extension.
FB16427985
What happens: calling window.open from the start page opens about blank on iOS 18.3. Similar to the first issue, but slightly different behaviour. This broke our links to our feedback submission, marketing site & help site.
When: Jan 30, 2025 - Safari 18.3
Status: Open, No response
Registering a content script more than once causes Safari to crash in macOS 15.4 beta
FB16831768
What happens: We have an optional content script that we were registering every time it was used. Although somewhat redundant, it was much simpler than checking if one was already registered and tracking if an updated one needed to replace it. This works fine on all other browsers and all prior Safari versions we've released it on. However if a user enables site blocker on the latest version, as soon as they visit any website, our content script registration causes Safari to crash. Essentially preventing users from using Safari until they uninstall our extension.
When: Mar 11, 2025 - Safari 18.4
Status: Open, No response
In Conclusion
Luckily we have been able to isolate and find workarounds for most of these issues so far, but we are not guaranteed to in the future. We are raising this not only to have these issues looked into, but to raise awareness of the rising trend of basic functionality of Safari extensions breaking with Safari updates. We hope that this can influence a shift in your QA & feedback intake practices to ensure these issues are less frequent in the future.
We are happy to raise future issues through your provided channels as they are discovered. But to have our feedback ignored and then have to rely solely on workarounds to prevent disruptions to our users' experience is concerning.
We submitted this feedback to our developer relations contact, and he suggested we submit a TSI to look into these issues. In response to this, we were advised to post this here.