This weekend I took my shiny new iPhone for a little summer long-weekend trip to Martha’s Vineyard. I learned a couple of really interesting things from doing this:
- AT&T’s cell coverage is pretty darn good — not only did it work on the island, it worked on the 45-minute ferry ride to and from the mainland.
- WiFi is everywhere, including on the ferry itself, making browsing way more fun.
- The iPhone's Safari browser crashes. A lot.
Whether I was on the WiFi networks I found or using the EDGE network, I found that Safari just wasn’t very stable. It crashed all the time — when I was zooming in or out, when I started scrolling through a page before it had finished loading, when I clicked links.
The crash experience was fine — you get dumped back to the home screen, can relaunch Safari, and generally are returned to the page you were at.
However, I was getting crashes practically every time I loaded more than two pages in row (not simultaneously, but juts visited two sites). This amount of crashing made the browser close to useless.
Happily, I didn’t have similar crashing problems with any other applications. Also happily, stability issues are the kind of thing that can fixed with a software update.
I regained a little stability by shutting the iPhone down and then turning it on again, but I haven’t done substantial testing after that.
Hopefully Apple will have a software update out in the next week or two to address this and any other problems that crop up.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you if you’re having similar Safari instability problems.
UPDATE: Since writing this article, browser stability has been the single most common issue iPhone owners have written to me about. There's still no ironclad answer, but my advice is to make sure you have the latest iPhone firmware and restart your phone every now and then.
