Safari Forgets Your History
Clicking a link in a web browser changes the URL, and if you look at the browser’s history after clicking, you’ll see both the old URL and the new URL. The URL can also be changed programmatically, using the JavaScript Location API. After a new location is assigned in JavaScript, you should also see the old URL and the new URL in the browser’s history. You should, and you do in Chrome and Firefox. But not in Safari! For some reason, Safari forgets the URLs. This bug appears to be many years old: it occurs in the latest version 15.1, and it occurs in the oldest version that I could test, Safari 11 on macOS 10.13 High Sierra. You can reproduce the bug by simply clicking the button below.
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If you want to see how this Safari bug plays out in “the real world” as opposed to just my contrived test, take a look at your history after searching the web with DuckDuckGo. Below you can see that I’ve clicked on a DuckDuckGo search result, but the new URL is missing from my Safari History.
This bug has been bothering me for years, and it does seem to primarily affect pages that I visited via search results.
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I think I’ve run into this a bunch, but I never realized it was a bug. I just assumed I was crazy.
Yep I've seen this behaviour (with DuckDuckGo searches in particular) going back to OSes prior to High Sierra. It's a golden oldie.
This has been around for ages, including macOS 10.12 Sierra and probably older until the current Safari 15.1 in macOS 11.6.1 (20G224) Big Sur. Searching Google shows such Google search results page, yet if you perform more Google searches, some of such pages do not show in Safari history. Some of such Google search results pages show, but others do not. It is really frustrating!
This has been around for ages, including macOS 10.12 Sierra and probably older until the current Safari 15.1 in macOS 11.6.1 (20G224) Big Sur. Searching Google shows such Google search results page, yet if you perform more Google searches, some of such pages do not show in Safari history. Some of such Google search results pages show, but others do not. It is really frustrating!
To admin: if you submit a comment but forget name and e-mail, no warning is issued and all is lost. It would be good if a warning showed. Thanks.
Other Safari bug is that when you start typing characters on the URL field, it shows previously visited sites (which is great), but sometimes do not show some of them. And I mean, some that you visit a lot, even a few hours ago. Instead, it shows older ones that you may not have visited for ages, or that you have visited much less times.
And yet other serious Safari bub that arose with Safari 15 in macOS 11 Big Sur (no problem before) is that when you select to "File - Save As" a web page (for instance, as ".webarchive") it no longer saves the webpage with its title name, but with a useless short name. Again, really frustrating!
And yet other serious Safari bug that arose with Safari 15 in macOS 11 Big Sur (no problem before) is that when you select to "File - Save As" a web page (for instance, as ".webarchive") it no longer saves the webpage with its title name, but with a useless short name. Again, really frustrating!