The Next Web’s Emil Protalinski explains the amusingly awful bug in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion that causes most Mac apps to crash when you type the string file:/// (you have to capitalize one of the letters in the word “file,” which we didn’t to avoid inadvertent crashes). The bug turns out to be in Apple’s Data Detectors code, and affects only apps that use NSTextFields. So the Finder, Safari, Messages, and TextEdit all crash, as does the Mac’s error reporter, but BBEdit and Firefox do not.
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Written by
Tonya Engst
A Simple Text String that Crashes Most Mac Applications
Interestingly the 'just published' email I received on this topic from TidBITS displays completely blank in Mail. If I do a 'reply to' it appears normally in the reply. And I can view it on the Gmail website. But in Mail the original email appears resolutely as a blank white page. Weird.
Yes, sorry! I had no idea Mail (and possibly other apps) would have trouble simply displaying the actual string that causes the crash, so I rewrote the title and text to eliminate it.
Awesome! I just typed it in a Mail message to try it out. When Mail crashed and the crash reporter came up I tried to explain how to recreate the bug but when I typed the offending string the crash reporter crashed.
[Edit: I tried it before I read the linked article. I see that they already pointed out the crash reporter crash. I was just so excited to try it though!]
[Edit: I tried it before I read the linked article. I see that they already pointed out the crash reporter crash. I was just so excited to try it though!]
Nice "feature!" What does one call this little gem? A Rotten Easter Egg?