Safari 2.0: Misleading error message

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
June 6th, 2005 • 5:00 am

I am still on dial-up. This makes me particularly aware of the shortcomings of Mac OS X in a situation with insufficient bandwidth. Here is an error message that I get regularly in Safari 2.0 when it’s trying to load a web page and can’t get a response from the server because my dial-up connection is saturated with another download:

Safari can’t open the page.

Safari can’t open the page “xxx”. The error was: “lost network connection” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1005) Please choose Report Bug to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

This is quite simply wrong and misleading. There’s nothing wrong with Safari itself. It certainly isn’t a “bug” that needs to be reported to Apple! It’s just that Safari has a time-out feature, and if it doesn’t get a response from the server after a while, it gives up.

There is absolutely no point in submitting a report to Apple about this. If they cared about dial-up users, they wouldn’t have given them an adjustable time-out setting long ago.

At the very least this error message should say: “Safari can’t open the page ‘xxx’. It might be because the server hosting the page is not responding at the moment, or because your Internet connection has been lost or is saturated. Please try again later. If the problem persists even when the server should be responding and the connection is free, then report bug etc.

One day, maybe.


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