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This is missing the most annoying one for me: when I type a search term into safari and it randomly interprets it as an address that it can’t resolve. E.g. “how to bake cookies” gets resolved to how%20to%20bake%20cookies (which safari tries to resolve via DNS or whatever instead of piping it to the search provider). Even better, it’s entirely nondeterministic, though it does seem to be due to some race condition with whatever determines whether it’s a search or a url, and is more likely to happen when typing quickly.

I’d say it happens about 10% of the time I type anything in the search bar. It’s incredibly annoying. Without getting into too much detail, but I confirmed they’re tracking it internally too for close to a decade and are intentionally choosing not to prioritize.





When you had gone to a site using a deep link, Safari insists on autocompleting any URL in the domain to that link you used even if you just want to go to the top-level URL/index of that site. You have to type out the entire URL and add a space at the end or something (and that still doesn't work sometimes) to stop iOS from doing that, which defeats the entire purpose of autocompletion. Btw switched off any autocorrection feature a long time ago. Still, I happen to mistype a lot compared to my old non-Apple phones (there was even an "it's not just you" article last year about it).

Apple needs to spend an entire release cycle to unfuck text entry and completion. However, with their qa lately (or lack thereof) they'd only manage to make it worse. The sad thing is they're still better than the alternatives, all things considered.


I personally reported that around time when Mac OS X 10.9 (first non-cat) came out and immediately saw it marked as duplicate. So at least 13 years and counting.

Browsers never should have gotten rid of the separate and dedicated search bar. I don't want my browser guessing whether what I'm typing is a search or a URL. It should be easy to guess, but they frequently get it wrong for doubtless stupid reasons. If you can't even reliably classify a URL vs. a search, just have two separate text inputs, like the old days!

Vivaldi still has it as an option. That said, I keep them combined and can't remember the last time it guessed wrong.

One of my favorite relics of this era was walking up to somebody's computer in the office and being able to see what they searched for last.

Not to mention not resolving local domains (and attempting to search instead) unless they specifically contain the `http://`.

Yep, this seems to be the case whenever one types a bit too fast.

Maybe you have an ISP that captures DNS checks to return ad sites, and Safari interprets that as a real website?

But honestly it seems extremely weird that Safari would interpret something with spaces as a URL instead of a search


You’re getting downvoted for some reason, but I’ve never experienced this bug, once, ever, in about 15 years of daily iPhone usage.

There surely must be some edge case/condition to discover (which is what you were trying to suggest)?


It’s more for safari on Mac OS

I've been using Safari on MacOS for at least 15 years and never run into this problem, either. I've never even heard of it before.

I've been seeing this from time to time since at least 2016. As others have noted, it's more likely to happen when you type quickly or immediately after pasting your search in the url bar.

Another perfect example of the article's thesis



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