jQuery 1.1.3.1 Safari Crashes After upgrading a high-traffic Web site from jQuery 1.1.2 to jQuery 1.1.3.1, some Safari users started reporting that the Web site would cause their browsers to crash. The crash would be that Safari would instantly shut down.
I set up multiple test environments using clean installs of Mac OS 10.4.0 through Mac OS 10.4.4 (with some newer 10.4.10 systems already in place), to determine which versions of Safari experienced this problem. This is the basic test code: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html><head><title></title> <script src="jquery-1.1.3.1.pack.js" type="text/javascript"></script> </head><body></body></html> There is zero functionality in that test code. It is just an include of the jQuery file. After loading this simple page, Safari 2.0.0 (412) through 2.0.2 (416.12) immediately crash. The error is 100% reproducible. Safari 2.0.3 (417.8) works. Safari 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 passed all of my more complex tests, which simulate the complex functionality found in the Web site. Based on user reports, I suspect that jQuery 1.1.3.1 would also cause versions of Safari older than 2.0 to crash. One person using Safari 1.3 reported a crash. I did not try to reproduce this. I performed my tests with both the packed version and the unpacked version. The packed version caused the browser to crash more quickly. With the unpacked version, I sometimes had to refresh the browser window a couple times before the crash occurred. jQuery 1.1.2 seems to work fine in these older versions of Safari. It passed all the complex tests, not simply the crash-avoidance test. So, for my solution, I have a conditional that uses jQuery 1.1.3.1 for Safari with version numbers 417 and higher, and jQuery 1.1.2 for Safari versions between 312 and 416. I hope this helps, Mike Chabot
