Crashes Tiger Every Time - Just Me?

[Makosuke]

This is A) A warning about a moderately unusual but easy-to-do thing that'll apparently stall Tiger, and

B) A request for anybody either brave or stupid enough to test whether it's just on my system.

All I did was this: Drag an image directly from Camino (web browser) to the icon of Graphic Converter in the Dock. Yes, this shouldn't work, but it froze Camino and promptly crashed the Dock.

The nasty part is, after the Dock auto-restarts and I get the "Would you like to report this?" message, after I send the crash report the system goes into a state where apps progressively stall until the entire UI is unresponsive and refuses to log me out. Very ugly, and reproduceable on my system.

Haven't yet narrowed down whether it's just Camino, just Graphic Converter, or if the report is part of the issue or it will stall eventually anyway, but I'm curious as to whether this is just me...

 

[ToastyX]

You have got to be kidding me...

This is yet another example of buggy services causing the system to stop responding. I'm getting sick of this. I'm tired of people acting like I don't know what I'm talking about or acting like I'm a troll when I say there's bugs and glitches everywhere. Macs are full of problems, yet NOBODY REALIZES IT.

Haven't yet narrowed down whether it's just Camino, just Graphic Converter, or if the report is part of the issue or it will stall eventually anyway, but I'm curious as to whether this is just me...

It happens if you drag an image from Camino to any program on the dock that will accept images, not just GraphicConverter. I got someone else to reproduce the problem as well, so it's not just you or me.

Still, this is a Mac OS X problem. A program shouldn't be able to cause this to happen no matter what.

Mac OS X is inherently flawed. This isn't the first time I've encountered a situation where buggy services would cause the system to stop responding.

 

[Makosuke]

I wouldn't go quite so far as to use this as evidence that "Macs are full of problems", being that it's the only crasher bug I've identified outside a particular Java networking routine since 10.2, and on most systems I run it on it runs stably and without issue well over 95% of the time--I know this because the dozen users complain when it doesn't.

That said, it is obviously a rather serious flaw in the way this services portion of the OS is handling exceptions, and should not be there. I don't know if it was introduced in 10.4, but the failure mechanism should be more robust so that at the very least it doesn't bring down the user session (technically, the entire OS doesn't fail, but since the user's session does it's nearly the same).

I can use the bug report form, but isn't it possible for people with dev access to report OS-level issues more directly? Anyone?

 

[stridey]

This an OS bug, filed with Apple as rdar://4174164

The Camino devs are also looking for a way to work around apple's problem. The Camino bug can be found here.

In the mean time, drag it to the desktop first (that works) and then from there to the dock.

 

[Makosuke]

Thanks for the heads-up, stridey--glad to hear it's filed as a bug. Obviously Camino should have a better way of dealing with this (Safari already does--dragging an image will open the cached file, which works just peachy, and hopefully the Camino devs will do something similar), but that doesn't change the fact that the OS should handle exceptions like this better.

Also, it's interesting to note that on my work system it does not appear to bring the whole system down--the exact same operation crashes the Dock, but I don't get the "report" option and the system seems to be running fine after the dock, Camino, and Finder are restarted (the latter two froze). As it's reproduceable at home I don't know quite what to make of this, but it's interesting (both systems on 10.4.3).