Safari: Problems with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Web site

For the past few days we've been covering some significant issues with Safari's ability properly access pages on eBay. 

We've now received several reports indicating issues accessing another site -- that of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The problem causes Safari to unexpectedly quit after a stall. Other Web browsers that don't make use of the WebKit framework (including Firefox) are not susceptible to the issue.

MacFixIt reader Richard Funderburk writes:

"My wife was wanting to send a question to TSA and tried to access the tsa.gov site.  After a spinning beach-ball Safari crashed!  I have validated the problem on another system.  Both systems are running Safari Version 2.0.4 (419.3).  I have tried clearing all of the caches on Safari (Safari Reset) but there was no change.  The site opens fine with Microsoft Explorer on a Windows system.  I have sent a query to the TSA but have not received a reply yet."

Michael Joiner adds:

"Try to load the Transportation Security Administration site www.tsa.gov with Safari. Safari consistently, every time, crashes on both my machines. Running fully updated OS 10.4.7, PowerPC G4. I have no problems loading this site with Firefox."

David Fell reports the issue with a fresh installation of Mac OS X:

"I've been trying for several weeks to track down an elusive problem that causes intermittent kernel errors (not panics, but unexpected program quits). As part of the diagnostics: Apple had me reinstall the OS. Working off a perfectly newly installed and updated system on my PowerMac Quad G5, I cannot open the www.tsa.gov site without crashing. 

We've received anonymous reports indicating that this issue does not affect early builds of Safari 3.0, the new edition of Apple's Web browser included with the Developer Preview of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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