Clicking Safari 5.1 select menu refreshes page

Question

This is both a question and an answer. I encountered a bug today that I've never seen in all my years as a web developer, so I wanted to share the fix with anyone who might encounter the issue in the future. I'm also curious if anyone else has experienced it, and whether there's a known cause.

The problem is exclusive to Safari 5.1 on a Mac. When a select dropdown menu was clicked, the page would completely refresh. After a few minutes of debugging, I was able to conclude that the bug was caused by ... wait for it ... putting a css border on the select box. (border:1px solid #ccc;)

WTF?

Apparently, Safari's rendering engine doesn't like that style, and it just nuked the whole page. It was only Safari 5.1 (5.0.3 was fine) and only on Mac.

It's 100% reproducible when it's happening, on multiple applications in my company. But it's not 100% reproducible universally, meaning I can't just go to any random website and trigger it. It must be some combination of css rules or html markup that triggers it.

Has anyone else ever seen this? Any insight into what specific conditions might cause it? If not, oh well. I'll chalk it up to a browser bug and leave this post up for some other developer to find when they're having the same problem.

Answer 1

Final Answer:

I found a final fix for the problem we were specifically having on our site. After the site loads, we have the TypeKit library attaching fonts to the page. When I specifically set the font-family property on the select boxes to something other than the TypeKit font, the refresh behavior no longer presents itself.

I'm not sure if you're using TypeKit or not, but that would be a good place to look first.

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Original Answer:

I encountered this issue as well today on one of the sites that my company runs. I had narrowed it down to a set of CSS rules that were most likely causing it (commenting those out would not produce the bug on page reload).

The main issue I see with this could very well be a security issue in the browser itself. If you have any open sessions in any tabs, it will clear their session data as well.

Find a page that has this bug, and open several other tabs where you log into a Google account, or some other set of accounts. When you click the select boxes on the site with the bug, the page is refreshed, and the sessions in the other tabs are reset as well.

Update: I have narrowed down the set of CSS rules that are affecting our page. Any one of these CSS rules will cause this behavior:

• -webkit-appearance
• border
• border-style
• border-radius
• -webkit-border-radius
• background-repeat
• background-position
• background-image

I had originally thought that it was the -background-image property that was causing issues, as we're using a data image, instead of an actual png or jpg (to give a style similar to the default in Firefox), but I was apparently wrong.

Update 2: I tried using CSS resets to put things back to normal using a webkit-specific CSS hack, but just touching any of these CSS rules seems to cause things to go haywire. I guess we will need to just remove the rules until there is a fix for this.

Update 3: It seems to have something to do with the Javascript being loaded on the page. If I disable Javascript in Safari, this does not happen.