Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Tue, 13 May 2003

Downloading binary files from Safari -- Beware!

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There's an interesting bug (I sure hope it isn't a feature!) in Safari (Public Beta 2) that people should be aware of -- if you download a binary file, and then for some reason you need to download it again -- perhaps the original download was corrupt and didn't come through properly -- Safari will probably just hand you a cached version of the original download!

For example, I've found that a certain percentage of downloads of the Watson disk image tend to not make it intact to the other side. Normally the user response would be "I'ts corrupt; I'll try downloading it again." But a Safari user has to first empty their cache (from the Safari menu) -- otherwise, the original, corrupt file will reappear instantly on their desktop.

And yes, I've reported it as a bug with Apple (using their real bug-reporting scheme; not the "bug" icon in Safari that generates a message that is probably read with as much attention as messages to president@whitehouse·gov are!)