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Safari can't recognise new TLDs...

R

rexone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
266
57
Lake Weyba on the sub-tropical Sunshine Coast :)
Hi all,
As you may (or may not) know a heap of new top level domains were recently released. These included things like .guru and .photography

I bought a few of these and have discovered a serious bug in Safari (across all Apple OS's).
Basically Safari will not recognise these new domains & instead it sees them as a google search request.
Try this & you'll see what I mean.
Without adding http:// at the front cut/paste either of these URLs of mine into a browser of your choice but please note that I had to put a space between www. and the name to stop http being automatically embeded so make sure you remove that space :

www. thegarden.guru

www. adamwoodhams.photography

On FireFox, Chrome and even IE on Win you will arrive at my home-page.
On Safari however you will only get a Google search results window.

Apple are trying to tell me that the problem is probably because
a) - the webpages don't exist,
b) - the pages are only viewable in Australia
c) - that this is expected behaviour for Safari
d) - all of the above

Can a few of you folks try these URLs from other countries & tell me what the result is?
In reply please note your browser, your country & page it resloves to so I can feed this back to Apple.
I'd love to know if anyone has Safari installed on Win & what happens.

I put this thread here in iOS as it's probably most relevant here but as I said it is across all versions of Safari on all Apple OSs' so mods... if you think it's better in another forum please move.

Cheers
 
maflynn

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,447
43,363
As Deguello stated it redirects to that other website regardless if I use chrome or safari. Could be a DNS issue, what is the expected outcome and does it work on other platforms?
 
R

rexone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
266
57
Lake Weyba on the sub-tropical Sunshine Coast :)
maflynn said:
As Deguello stated it redirects to that other website regardless if I use chrome or safari. Could be a DNS issue, what is the expected outcome and does it work on other platforms?
Click to expand...

Thanks Mike, it should be redirecting to my main homepage, the one you arrived at.

When you say you used Safari what address did you enter? Did it have http in front? Because if you've managed to get there via Safari that's a first so need to see if that can be replicated to feed back to Apple.
Their techs have so far said they are totally unable to get the page to open at all in Safari.
The feedback I'm having from other users (I sent a shout-out on my FaceBook page) is that bascially every major browser on Mac OX & Windows will take you to the expected page, http://www.adamwoodhams.com.au, with the exception of Safari.
On iOS devices with Safari none of the addresses will resolve to anything but a page of google search results but they will resolve as expected on Chrome for iOS.

You can try it with addresses that have nothing to do with me & you'll see the same results try www. yoga.guru or www. landscape.photography on Safari and then on other browsers.
Cheers
Adam

----------
Deguello said:
From the US, it utterly fails in Safari and redirects to http://www.adamwoodhams.com.au/ in Chrome (OS X 10.9.2).
Click to expand...

Thanks Deguello.
 
GreyOS

GreyOS

macrumors 68040
Apr 12, 2012
3,355
1,682
have tried my friends .guru site and it just does a google. have to put http:// (www. doesn't work)

same with your one
 
maflynn

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
May 3, 2009
73,447
43,363
rexone said:
Thanks Mike, it should be redirecting to my main homepage, the one you arrived at.

When you say you used Safari what address did you enter? Did it have http in front? .
Click to expand...

I always enter http do, as a matter of habit. So I guess the new TLD is working, at least for me in the US using iOS 7's Safari and Maverick's Safari
 
R

rexone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
266
57
Lake Weyba on the sub-tropical Sunshine Coast :)
maflynn said:
I always enter http do, as a matter of habit. So I guess the new TLD is working, at least for me in the US using iOS 7's Safari and Maverick's Safari
Click to expand...

Thanks Mike,
Yes, it's working, if one expresses & uses the entire http address, but not if one uses the accepted (& normally functional) convention of just entering www.
That's the issue.
It looks pretty average on marketing material to have an address that shows http etc... Feels like we're back in the '90's...
To take that one step further... these days most addresses can just be entered without even adding the www. so thegarden.guru
Again, I can enter that URL sans http & www into Chrome or FF and it will resolve to the correct address. Safari... no chance.
 
J

jeremysteele

Cancelled
Jul 13, 2011
485
394
Still finding this behavior very weird.... seems to happen quite often with different extensions.

When I develop I use .srv as a local development domain for clients, and I never even noticed those behave oddly under safari too - but fine in everything else.

As mentioned above... must be some flawed "is it a domain or is it search?" logic.
 
R

rexone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
266
57
Lake Weyba on the sub-tropical Sunshine Coast :)
jeremysteele said:
As mentioned above... must be some flawed "is it a domain or is it search?" logic.
Click to expand...

That's my thinking Jeremy.
I'm onto Apple techs about it & they've escalated the issue to look at it further.
Initially they tried to fob me off saying it was 'expected behaviour' or the problem must have been at my end, pebkac much..., but I think they're taking it seriously now as they should as this effects 100's of thousands of URLs and makes them useless for conventional deployment anywhere a user is likely to encounter the URL on iOS or OSX.
 
J

jeremysteele

Cancelled
Jul 13, 2011
485
394
rexone said:
That's my thinking Jeremy.
I'm onto Apple techs about it & they've escalated the issue to look at it further.
Initially they tried to fob me off saying it was 'expected behaviour' or the problem must have been at my end, pebkac much..., but I think they're taking it seriously now as they should as this effects 100's of thousands of URLs and makes them useless for conventional deployment anywhere a user is likely to encounter the URL on iOS or OSX.
Click to expand...

Glad to hear they are checking on it at least.

if it was just OS X it would be a nonissue really - really low usage. But since it is iOS as well - they sure as heck should fix it.
 
T

tldgeek

macrumors newbie
Mar 25, 2014
4
0
yes I can confirm that this is a frustrating issue. The new TLDs have been live for months now and there is still no support in Safari!? Obviously this is a big deal since these extensions are not going anywhere and they need to be functional in Safari especially since this is one of the most widely used web browsers today. I have a number of the new gTLDs and they do not function in iOS as they are supposed to - instead they redirect to a google search! It should be a simple fix for apple to implement that anything following a dot (.) should be treated as a gTLD. So when someone enters http://www.xyz.tips or xyz.tips it will direct the user to the http://www.xyz.tips website and not a google search. I don't know of any other reason (other than entering an ip address) someone would be entering a dot or period (.) into the address bar other than to specify a domain name so this should be something that apple can implement quickly to insure users can access websites utilizing the new TLDs. The logic would be pretty simple to allow a qualified IP address string to still work as usual while allowing pretty much anything else following a dot (.) to be treated as a gTLD. Has anyone else tried contacting apple engineers about this issue and what responses have you received? I thought for sure apple would already have been on top of this in time for the new gTLD launches but I was disappointed to see the weeks come and go with no solution to this problem! Please help Apple!
 
T

tldgeek

macrumors newbie
Mar 25, 2014
4
0
New Apple Support Tread Created

FYI, I created a thread for this on the Apple support communities so hopefully it will gain some traction there. Maybe if someone has an Apple developer account, you can pass the thread along to an Apple Engineer?

https://discussions.apple.com/message/25293525#25293525

Thanks for your feedback guys, hopefully we can get Apple to take action on this soon =)
 
smirking

smirking

macrumors 68040
Aug 31, 2003
3,741
3,716
Silicon Valley
You can get this to work in Safari. Just type "http://" before the domain name.

Yeah, Safari is interpreting that you intend to run a search instead of visit a website if there's no http:// in front. Add that and there's no ambiguity as to what you intended and you'll find the site.
 
T

tldgeek

macrumors newbie
Mar 25, 2014
4
0
Thanks for the reply smirking, unfortunately, that doesn't solve our issue. Of course we can get to our sites OK by typing the full address with http://www. or adding a slash at the end but the problem is most people trying to visit the new gTLD websites will not be typing the fully qualified domain name (why would they waste the time when they don't have to do this for any other TLDs like .com) so they will still get the google search. The problem is about allowing the browser to recognize the new gTLDs like they would any other TLD like .com and sending users looking for a particular website to that website and not a google search. Apple needs to make some modifications to the logic used to identify a TLD so the new gTLDs will work like they should. Like I said earlier pretty much everything following a dot (.) should be treated as a TLD unless it is a qualified IP address. When someone enters something in the address bar with a (.) it now more than ever needs to be recognized as a domain name or IP address and not a google search.



I have sent a Safari bug report to Apple via the feeback form below and sugest anyone else having this problem do the same - the more demand apple has for this fix, the sooner it will happen!



You can report the bug to Apple about the new gTLD domains not working properly here:



http://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html
 
R

rexone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
266
57
Lake Weyba on the sub-tropical Sunshine Coast :)
tldgeek said:
I have sent a Safari bug report to Apple via the feeback form below and sugest anyone else having this problem do the same - the more demand apple has for this fix, the sooner it will happen!

You can report the bug to Apple about the new gTLD domains not working properly here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for all your input tldgeek. All very valid points and exactly the sort of stuff I've been pointing out to Apples techs.
Apple are really behind the game on this one as the issue does not occur on FireFox or Chrome on the OS or on Chrome on the iOS. It's an Apple-specific issue (I also found out that it's not a problem with IE or other non-Apple browsers on Windows)
Long story short last night I had a call from Apple tech support as they had escalated my issue and have been looking into it.
Their engineers are now fully aware of the problem and acknowledge it's a bug across all versions of Safari. They are aiming to fix it in the next iOS & Safari updates. I urged them to issue a tech support note in the meantime so people are aware of this MAJOR problem.
 
T

tldgeek

macrumors newbie
Mar 25, 2014
4
0
Can anyone else confirm if they can get the new TLDs to work in Safari and what platform you are using - Mac / PC / iOS device? It looks like Safari still has the bug on iOS devices and I haven't been able to test the new TLDs on a Mac yet.

Hopefully if you haven't already done so, if you are having this issue with the new TLDs, you can submit a bug report to apple via their feedback form linked below. It only takes 1 minute to fill out and submit and the more complaints they get the sooner this issue will get fixed!


You can report the bug to Apple about the new gTLD domains not working properly here:


http://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html

hope everyone is having a good weekend!
 
L

lost odinson

macrumors newbie
Jun 10, 2014
1
0
mine either

I own label.watch, and paid a hefty $40 for the short, sweet domain.
iOSsafari doesn't even recognize it as one of my top pages when I put it in the address bar
 
smirking

smirking

macrumors 68040
Aug 31, 2003
3,741
3,716
Silicon Valley
lost odinson said:
I own label.watch, and paid a hefty $40 for the short, sweet domain.
iOSsafari doesn't even recognize it as one of my top pages when I put it in the address bar
Click to expand...

I can see why this would be a problem. It's also a problem that would be easily solved if Safari and every other browser kept the search and the addressbar separate. Now that TLDs can be anything, there will be cases where it'll be a guessing game as to the user intended to search for a complicated string or if the user wanted to access a domain.
 
R

rexone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2007
266
57
Lake Weyba on the sub-tropical Sunshine Coast :)
smirking said:
I can see why this would be a problem...
Click to expand...

Damn straight!
Here we are over 3-months after the problem was noted & it still persists.
I have been through Apple's tech support system & had it elevated to a reasonably high level. They said it would be fixed. It still isn't.
Apple is obvioulsy not serious about fixing what amounts to a serious fault with their iOS browser.
I have domains that I want to start using for my business which I can't do as they basically don't work on iOS.
What I don't get is why it is no problem at all with Chrome on iOS and was never an issue wth FireFox or Chrome on the OS yet Safari chokes all-round.
What sort of people are Apple employing these days?
Get with it Apple! Just absurd.
 
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