Safari 12 Crashes Spotlight in Sierra—Here’s the Fix

Article Comments
23

I’m not sure your directions are complete. Don’t you first have to disable SIP to edit these files? When I try to save with BBedit I just get an error that it can’t save it maybe because I have SIP enabled?

Also, like someone else has mentioned in another thread, I don’t see the existence of the com.apple.weblocation string in the plist.

Also, where you say “Location:” doesn’t match up with what I see in my plist. Do I paste everything you wrote here in the plist somewhere?

<string>QLGenerator</string><key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
<array>
	<string>public.data</string>
	<string>com.apple.internet-location</string> <!-- sierra-webloc-crashfix  -->
</array>

OR just this part somewhere?

<string>com.apple.internet-location<string>

Very confusing.

24

Hooray! It looks like Safari 12.0.3 finally fixed my running problem with Safari 12! This is the first Safari 12 update I tried that didn’t introduce the .webloc crashing problem (see my 11/21/2018 entry above). I tested with both a fresh Sierra (10.12.6) install, and my fully up to date copy of Sierra that I had downgraded back to Safari 11.1.2. In both cases updating to Safari 12.0.3 did NOT introduce the .webloc crashing that I encountered after every previous Safari 12 update (12, 12.0.1, and 12.0.2).

The curse has lifted!

25

Does Safari 12.1 bring the Quick Look Finder crash back in Sierra or does it remain fixed?

26

Appears to be as I can’t seem to make it crash.

There is no longer a <string>com.apple.weblocation</string> in the info.plist, but there isn’t a <string>com.apple.internet-location</string>, either.

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27

With Safari 12.1, did they fix the issue where Quick Look on webloc files doesn’t show a website preview in Sierra or is that still broken and only showing a generic webloc thumbnail?

28

Is that really an issue? I don’t normally deal with webloc files, so I don’t know that it shows a website preview in a different OS, but to answer your question, it still? shows a generic weblog thumbnail.

The only quicklook generator in /System/Library/Quicklook/ is one for WebArchives, and that does show a thumbnail.

-Al-

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29

Yeah, before the update to Safari that caused crashes, you could use Quick Look on webloc files and it would pull website data off the Internet and show the site just like Quick Look works on images and videos.

Then after Apple fixed the crash with Safari 12.0.3, they didn’t re-enable that capability and we still just see generic thumbnails in Sierra. Not sure about other macOS versions however.

30

I see only the generic thumbnail in High Sierra. Will let you know about Mojave when I get back to it later this week.

-Al-

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31

Wow, I wonder if they killed it for every macOS version? Guess there was a security issue perhaps with the feature they couldn’t or wouldn’t resolve. Then again, last I checked it was still working in High Sierra, just not Sierra. Strange that it’s not working for you.

32

I looked thorough all the Apple Security notes yesterday to see if I could locate anything along those lines, but have not been able to. There was some speculation about this back in January when Safari 12.0.3 came out, but nothing to confirm.

I know there was an issue with Browser Address Bar spoofing back in 2015 which was fixed long ago, so perhaps it’s related to that.

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