Safari on iPad changed URL in address bar

TidBITS Talk
1

On an iPad (Air 2, running iOS 12.4.1, with an external keyboard, if any of that matters), I pasted http://w2.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=fgf into the address bar and pressed return. Safari said it could not connect to the server. Inspection of the URL in the address bar revealed that it had been changed to http://w2.weather.govclimate/index.php?wfo=fgf (the slash between gov and climate had been removed). I again pasted the URL and confirmed that it was what I pasted into this message; again the URL got changed. In the address bar, I put two slashes between gov and climate and pressed return; it worked, and the URL in the address bar was what I had pasted originally. In other words, Safari removed one slash from the edited URL. Other URLs, including URLs with servers *.weather.gov, loaded properly before and after the peculiar URL. Any thoughts?

3

Same thing happens in Safari 13 for Mojave.

4

I can reproduce the problem as well, but it’s fine in Brave and Firefox, so it’s definitely a Safari bug that’s worth reporting.

5

Woo hoo! I found a bug!

I would be happy to let someone else report it. I would be almost as happy to report it myself, if someone would be so kind as to provide an appropriate link.

6

https://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html

Apple’s feedback page is a bit confusing. Safari only shows up under macOS, but if you select it there, it does offer iOS as selectable host OS.

7

Thanks, Simon. I reported the behavior.

8

Mr. Varnell,
http://w2.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=fgf Perhaps you meant iOS 13? Same problem as OP on my iPhone with that OS. I can’t check my iPad as it is, like me, too old!

Works fine in Mojave macOS 10.14.

9

This isn’t a bug in Safari, it is an error at the weather.gov site. The site is redirecting to the bad URL.

The only reason it works on some browsers is a) to see the bad redirect you have to start with exactly either URL https://www.weather.gov/climate/ or http://w2.weather.gov/climate/, and b) if the browser has previously gone or redirected to https://w2.weather.gov, it will have cached that “w2.weather.gov” should be HTTPS, and subsequent access will automatically use HTTPS. This skips the bad redirect, which is only on http://w2.weather.gov/climate/, not https.

I reported the bad redirect to the National Weather Service webmaster, so by the time you read this perhaps the site issue will have been fixed.