Glow-project Glow

A number of users have complained to BBC Weather that the weather site is causing Safari on an iPhone to crash. In order to replicate this issue:

1) Visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/8
2) Click on the Next 24 Hours tab
3) Click on the 5 day forecast tab
4) Repeat steps 2 and 3 until Safari decides to quit out (find yourself back on the home screen of the phone)

What appears to 'fix' the crashing is to pause the 'ticker', which is the scrolling headlines near the top of the page.

The ticker is a seperate FM&TJ app from the weather code which was built by other guys in CSD FM&TJ using glow methods) (there is a button to pause the ticker on the right side of it.

With the ticker paused Safari now seems to behave as expected.

So there is something to do with the display of headlines or polling for new headlines which is causing the browser to crash out.

The issue could quite possibly be code within the ticker app or the methods which the app is calling from glow - as of yet i'm not sure!

We have contacted Steven Woolcock from Apple (woolcock.s@euro.apple.com) about this issue and he is doing some seperate investigations into it, however he informed me that he managed to get Safari on his Mac Desktop to crash too (although when we tested it we couldn't replicate it).

Email from Steve:

Hi Peter,

I managed to make desktop Safari crash on the same page while running the web inspector & javascript debugger. (See attached crash dump).

The file sizes appear to be OK, so I think that something unusual is happening when the XHTML is parsed.

Will continue next week as soon as I have a moment.

Have a good weekend,

Steve