photo by: Simon Barnes

I swear I’m not making this up.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I found it. Safari is one of our favorite browsers, and we love their work on standards compliance and speed, particularly JavaScript, but this particular bug is really driving us crazy. I’ve logged it with Apple (#5786274), and a fix is promised, but in case you’re getting hit with this and are as baffled as I was, here are the details:

• If your computer has less than 1GB of RAM, Safari fails to cache items larger than 104,857 bytes.
• If your computer has more than 1GB of RAM, Safari failes to cache items larger than 209,715 bytes.
• JPEGs, at least, are temporarily cached in RAM. Whew. But upon browser restart, you’ll see they didn’t make it to the disk cache, so you have to get them again.
• Other objects, like SWFs or videos, though, don’t even make it to the RAM cache, let alone disk. Load the same SWF back-to-back, and you’ve just transfered the bytes twice. Ugh.

Very easy to reproduce yourself from the comfort of your own home, so go for it. Just fire up HTTP Scoop or Wireshark or tail your server’s HTTP logs and start hitting stuff. Marvel at the # of excess bytes transferred across the wire that you didn’t need.

Here are a couple of test URLs so you can see for yourself:

• JPEG test
• SWF test

As a self-professed Apple fanboy, I can’t wait for a fix. In the meantime, we’ve had to jump through all sorts of hoops to ‘dumb down’ some of our most exciting new features.

UPDATE: Yes, I’ve tried with every Cache-Control and Expires header known to man. No, it doesn’t make a difference. Try it yourself.

Over on IEBlog and A List Apart, they detail a new flag for the upcoming IE8 that would enable you to “lock” the browser down to older versions should you be expecting older broken behavior from IE6 or IE7.

This is a bad idea. The Safari team has a great write-up about why they think it’s a bad idea, which I agree with, but I also have an additional take:

Pages and sites that are likely to care about this are poorly written and poorly maintained. Microsoft created this problem themselves when they let IE6 sit idle for more than half a decade, and now they have to deal with it. Instead of letting someone flag their site as being broken (that’s what they’re doing), why shouldn’t they finally force them to fix their site and improve the browsing experience for everyone (not to mention improve the stability, speed, and maintainability of their codebase)?

If someone owned a car, but didn’t know how to drive it properly, would we bend the driving laws to let them on the road? Of course not. Some reasonable adherence to standards and moving things forward is the only thing keeping the web browser mess from descending into pure chaos.