How "Crash Safari" Reboots Your Phone 

Tom: "I'm just as bad as them, using this for clickbait." Also Tom: *doesn't use exaggerated titles, explains the info properly, and actually provides an interesting analysis of the code and why it happens instead of just reporting that it happens*

Love these videos about computer exploits :-)

"JOURNALISM!" -Tom Scott, 2016

Is the camera slightly moving around or am I going crazy?

"Each browser tab is a seperate process on your machine"... THATS why there's so much going on in my task manager, thanks...

The fact that it crashes due to memory exhaustion is not really a huge problem. It's annoying but it happens. However, the fact that memory exhaustion in an application (Safari) crashes the whole operating system is a huge, enormous bug in memory management of that operating system. And indication that Safari has some strange privileges that no application should have

that's simple... I still have the iPad 1, I can't use safari without it crashing.

1:36, begging to be a GIF

I fell for the trick in 2016 when I was discussing Crash Bandicoot in a chat room, saw someone post a link to Crash Safari, and thought it might be Crash Bandicoot related so I clicked it which caused every tab and window to crash. The person that linked it got banned for it. I was the only one that fell for the trick.

At least this is a fairly benign way to make the issue exceedingly apparent, rather than a more malicious use of it.

Does Tom Scott own like 50 red T-shirts?

So if I set this as the home page on my friend's iPhone...

i love how when some talks about Apple fixing a bug it's always "maybe they will, maybe they won't"

_"JOURNALISM!"_ I hear you my friend. While the web has increased information sharing in a way we could never imagine it's also destroyed journalistic integrity in the process. It's no longer about facts, it's about clicks and ad revenue.

I know you were probably joking at the end ("...or RU-vid videos about it...Sorry") but I just wanted to state that I don't think that having somebody with technical understanding explain a 'viral' technical issue in fairly significant depth (at least compared to 99.9% of 'news' coverage) is an instance of hopping on the bandwagon of clickbai- pseudo-news :)

I'm off to maliciously crash the phones of my friends.

I like how Tom made a whole video about how it’s impossible for a computer to detect if a piece of code has an infinite loop then just casually slips in “safari checks to see if there’s an infinite loop and stops loading the page”

Thanks to RU-vid again for giving me a video about a software vulnerability not present anymore.

You always explain stuff simply but not treat us like idiots. Even being in the computer and electronics field I always learn something. Keep it up and thank you.

I like how you build a narrative for these videos. It makes them more entertaining than just plainly explaining how the code works.

Yea but you earned the click by actually explaining it in detail lol

Wait, so history.pushState makes it possible to just put whatever into browser history? I could see that being really cool in a puzzle game. Like, there would be a puzzle that seems impossible to solve, and a hint that says "look to the past" or something, so you'd need to check your history, where you'd find the solution to the puzzle.

I wonder how easy it is for Tom to describe such technical stuff when the rest of us is sweating just before every single PowerPoint presentation 😂

I like the way you say stuff like "something has gone desperately wrong". Makes me think you should record desaster stories or something, it just sounds so terrifyingly serious! XD

In the 1024 system, it comes to 22 gigs, 303 megs, 195 kilos, and 55 bytes. It is 23.940.238.391 total bytes.

I swear tom's videos have the most comments from verified tubers.

Tom's videos always have the absolute best endings. Funny and clever, every single time.

Chrome > Firefox > Death > Aids> Internet Explorer > Safari

You definitely don't need to apologize for such a great and well researched video. I love your videos.

Yeah, that's a nasty little buffer overflow error. It's a security hole all right. Someone *could* use it to execute arbitrary code. Could. They haven't done that yet. Apple will likely fix it in the next update.

Dude THESE are the kinda videos we like to see!!!!!!!

The second I saw that for loop I said 'oh no' out loud.

I just want to say, I love your videos and they inspire me all the time! Thanks for everything you do

I remember a web page from the late 90's ( back in the Netscape days) that would change your homepage to itself then close your browser. So every time you opened your browser after that it would instantly close.

Always love when you have updates. Some of the most fun things that I never hear about otherwise.

Haha, I love the self awareness at the end! Great video Tom!! I really like the directions you've been taking things. This channel will just continue to grow with this kind of content.

1:27 Fun fact, nobody's "hurriedly bashing out a few hundred words". That kind of writing is almost entirely automated. Those tech companies are spending at most ten minutes getting that article out there.

These features you've pointed out about firefox and chrome are really flawed. Admittedly I am a "new tab 'till crash" type browser, but nonetheless: Chrome shares resources between pages on the same domain. I don't know if each page IS actually a new thread, but if one crashes they all crash. Which makes Chrome fail safe rarely - sometimes, defeating the purpose. Firefox's "hey something's going on here, better impose limitations" seems to work on a similar premise. It'll cap you at 4gb of ram usage (of 16) then grind to a halt. To bad M$ fixed that window refresh issue that let you draw pictures with dying programs, that was fun.

He’s actually a skilled truthful journalist. More of the kind of journalists we need

This may be the most devastating use of pushHistory, but the most irritating use is definitely when annoying ads take over your browser window and insert 100 copies of the same page, effectively disabling your back button unless you know you can press-and-hold on the back button to select which page to return to. And now some of those ads have even gotten smart enough to overflow the displayed history length, making THAT impossible to even do.

Is this fixed? When I go to the website, it just says "What were you expecting?" and that's that.

2:30 HOLY MOLY I'M IN THE MATRIX AND AGENT SMITH HAS A RED T SHIRT

Apple must have issued a fix. Crash Safari dot corn does not crash Safari anymore.

But hey, that code is sure fun to use in a MITM attack when my friends come over to my house ;)

It's more like a respring really, only takes about 5 seconds to get back in the OS, no sim pin required either.

Every tab in Chrome is a separate process?! So that's why all my RAM got filled up when I had 500+ tabs open!

Love the way you explain & present these things.

DELL PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!!

It got you more than just a click; it got you a whole like. Congrats!

IOS Chrome just crashed when the video ended.

Worth more than all the mainstream tech news combined about this subject!

Side note about use JavaScript to mess with people client-side: some of you may have heard of the anonymous chat site Omegle, where you're paired with a random person online who you don't know and told to chat. One of their newer features (though it's not so new anymore) is the ability to ask a question to two random people and eavesdrop on them discussing it. Weird, I know. When Omegle Spy (as it's called) was first introduced, the devs did basically no sanitation on these questions. None. Which meant it was quite easy to inject JavaScript code which, when your question was displayed to other users of the site, would just...run. So, partly as a troll and partly to show how it could be abused, I opened up a new Firefox process and submitted my own question: "Tell Omegle to fix their code," followed by a fork bomb. Anyone who was randomly assigned my question quickly had their browser crash (or, for Chrome users, that one tab). It was glorious :)

0:40 I think Firefox has now multi threading

4:48 Homebrew Communities: _Allow us to introduce ourselves._

Who needs ASMR when videos like this exist (All jokes, this was very informational and entertaining)

saw you on an other site, but had to come to your video to like and comment. you explained it really well and your joke at the and made me giggle

I do wonder if this has any practical use. Does anyone know if there ever is any state where something is deeply wrong with your Iphone, and you absolutely need to reset it, but something is stopping the phone from shutting down naturally by holding down the power button? Of course, this state also would still have to allow you to use safari on your phone without much of an issue.

Chrome separating processes for tabs is exactly why I don't use it. Generally where I notice problems is Flash/HTML5, that's the real hog. And while Firefox is dumping all I do under 1 process at around roughly 2,5GB RAM it makes all elements (images, videos etc) black prompting me to refresh Firefox at some point. So that's kind of "contained". Chrome on the other hand totally doesn't and happily stacks and stacks and stacks until it ate 16GB of RAM and the entire pc goes into a major fit about everything.

Nice stylistic link between Tom's trademark red t-shirt and the red bus in the picture.

the difference between this article and the ones on tech sites IMO, is that this doesn't just ask what is it and report on that.... it asks WHY, and reports on that.... its the reason i subbed to Tom Scott in the first place.... and then i saw all the other awesome content like citation needed and the language files

If Tom replies to this, I'll do nothing special. That's it. Actually I'll like the video... oh hell I'll do that anyway.

"while(true) {}" brings back a lot of bad memories

Honestly, your videos are the best.

Actually, I can think of *one* practical use for that. I'm occasionally faced with people whose iPhone's power button has given out, so that they're unable to restart their phone. Sure, there's Settings / General / Reset / Reset Network Settings, which will reboot it, but then you have the hassle of having to enter passwords again for all your WiFi connections.

I'm on the latest iOS beta and I believe that the rebooting bug has been resolved (or it has been for me at least). Still crashes safari though

I would like to know what causes apps to crash. I'd like to know how they work and why some apps rarely crash while others crash almost immediately when you try to do anything with it. Is it be due to a looping error similar to browsers or something entirely different. I'm really interesting to find out.

An explanation like this is worth a million news articles.

Out of random curiosity, I decided to write a small program that did the same thing, except instead of spamming the browser's history, it just counted how many characters would have been written after a certain amount of loop iterations. For 100,000 iterations the result turned out to be 23,939,749,495 bytes, or about 22.3 GB

1:36

*phone* allows its self to receive 25gigabytes of data, realises it can only store one, crashes

Don't be sorry, I love these videos!

Every time I watch a video with you talking in it, I feel the unshakable need to clear my throat.

2:55 Off-by-one error. 0->99,999

journalism!!!

There has never been a better channel that's explained bite-sized coding topics to a complete novice like me

As the "tech news" buzz around this "news" purely for Page views, Tom Scott sit down and actually explain the bug so users can learn something.

WAIT I just realized that Tom looks like grian's minecraft skin

Researchers have figured out away to jailbreak iOS 9.1 devices though safari apparently, so go figure?

Your videos are best bedtime videos ever.

I love these types of videos you do Tom

so it doesnt crash on a computer with 32GB of ram?

“What were you expecting?” It says. Kinda disappointed

5 years later, it still happens somehow

Haha, it started buffering and skipping at the start and I just left it because I've grown accustomed to people (*cough* Tom *cough*) including it as part of the video, especially on a video about crashing

That didn't explain why crashing a single app reboots the phone. The OS shall kill the process if it consumes too much memory

I guess I have an idea why this site exists. And most people who ever talked to this special kind of "Mr. Apple lover" will. Conversation example piece: A: Apple is so great B: No it isn´t. It was back when Woz A: You don´t know anything. Their design B: Is stolen from Braun. Check [Link to site Tom doesn´t want to see down here] and you will see how great Apple is.

linus with his 1tb ram pc: hold my beer

So this video was a shameless attempt at clicks? It worked on me. Well done, Tom.

chrome://inducebrowsercrashforrealz crashes chrome and edge!

RU-vid player crashed at 0:25 and I sat there for like 20 seconds thinking it was part of the video... :D

Sometimes I watch RU-vid shorts on my phone and the app goes all weird and my screen goes strange colours and I need to wait a second or two before I can even close the app. Its very strange.

"All that browsing data adds up to 24GB, and the iPhone only has 1GB of RAM" Not if you're on a 32GB gaming system. I've been stuck on a Core 2 Duo gaming system with 8GB of RAM for about three years now. 8GB is okay for gaming, not so much for surviving a browser crash

1:57 *Virgin* on the top left

In chrome every browser tab is a different process, which is why chrome just loves to gobble ram

Hey Tom! Mozillas Nightly builds have e10n, which also puts tabs as individual processes. So it's coming soon, in case you want to add it as an annotation

Thank you for including the code! It's really cool to see that such a small piece of code can do so much.

i feel like im becoming smarter listening to this when 75% of what hes saying i dont even understand

This is Diamonds for Android users.

God damn I hate push, if I press back I want to go back to the previous website I was on!

+Tom Scott Not sure whether you were just referring to your iPhone in particular, but the latest generation iPhone has 2GB of RAM. Also there's a typo in the english CC at 1:14 where it says "fianlly" instead of "finally".