Snippet: Let’s Crash Apps in OS X Mountain Lion! ☇

Shared on February 4, 2013

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes for Forbes shares a weird bug that hopefully will be fixed in OS X Mountain Lion (Safari crashed twice while trying to post it). Typing ‘File:///’ will cause most OS X apps to crash:

It must be typed exactly like that, including the capital “F” at the beginning. And the operating system must be OS X 10.8 ‘Mountain Lion’ — other versions are immune to this.

This bug is apparently caused by Data Detectors, a feature in OS X since 10.5, that looks for key words (names, dates, etc.) in content that you can use for other tasks. One common application is a date in an email can be clicked to create a Calendar/iCloud event. Although this bug has already gotten widespread coverage, I rarely—if ever—come across this URL scheme, and I would assume this is the case for most everyone else.

Snippets are posts that share a linked item with a bit of commentary.