Safari screen freeze issue

Hello,


I wrote a web application for use in mobile devices 6+ years ago - back when iPhones were still mainly the only phone web applications ran in.


Essentially the app is a set of HTML pages which uses localStorage and the HTML5 Application Cache to allow it work in offline mode. It's a data entry app used in locations where mobiles are required to be used in airplane mode, then upon finishing (and restoring coverage after switching off airplane mode) a sync process sends all the localStorage data back to our server.


The app has worked perfectly fine in those past 6+ years on al iOS devices, but sometime between iOS 9.2.1 and iOS9.3.1, it has developed an issue where it completely freezes in Safari after certain actions. The only way to un-freeze it is to go to a different tab/window, then back again, then it works perfectly fine.


The certain actions involve jQuery element manipulation - essentially there's a bunch of dynamically generated rows of fields for data entry, and when you've finished a row you can save it to localStorage. I animate the removal of the row and insertion of a new clone, to make it obvious what's happened. It's after these actions that the whole page becomes completely unresponsive to finger taps: the select and button elements in the rows, the buttons in the header ... the whole thing freezes.


It doesn't happen in Chrome at all. Only Safari post iOS 9.2.1.


It'd difficult to replicate in jsFiddle, not without a lot of work. i'm basically hoping this (very) limited question description makes someone go "Oh, I had that problem, I fixed it by doing this". Or perhaps "Yeah ... they stuffed that up in Safari in 9.3 ... waiting for them to fix it".


I've seen prior reference to fields taking a long time to trigger the keyboard:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19335109/ios-7-safari-os-locks-up-for-4-seconds-when-clicking-focusing-on-a-html-input

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22471951/safari-iphone-ios-7-freezes-on-input-text-focus


I tried some of the suggestions in there, even though they're iOS 7 related, and none of it worked.


The fact that simply changing tab focus fixes the problem has me convinced it's something they've done in Safari. That plus, we hven't changed the code for years.


bj.

We are having exactly the same issue. Responsive mobile site we built over a year ago worked fine. Until recently. All pages that use local and session storage freeze until any other button/link on that page is clicked. Issue occurs only in Safari. We've tried to trigger a silent click on those pages as a workaround for now but this didn't work for us.


Lily

Several months on and we've ended up telling people to use Chrome instead.


I tried several things:

- removed all jQuery CSS animation from page

- pared back all use of localStorage to one get on page load, and one set on page unload

- removed all jQuery cloning


Still freezes up. Still gets fixed by clicking another tab and going back.


I was just about to try getting rid of all appcache references and see if that fixes it, but my server died and my sys admin is in the Daintree.


Apple said that can't really do anything without a crash log, but this problem doesn't seem to trigger a crash log entry.


Chrome FTW.

greetings,

I'm experiencing the same, I was able to trace that it hangs when loading an html template , is like the render engine never finishes and then the main page becomes unresponsive .

The odd part is that some times does work fine, connected to the web inspector theres no javacript error, and the connection confirms that the file was retrieved properly either when it works or when it freezes and that's why I presume the issue must be in the render engine.

any help would be appreciated since wihtout a specific error message I can't figure it out how to get the safari in ios to work, since we are a service provider we have been recomending our clients to use chrome or to buy android phones instead.

Safari screen freeze issue
 
 
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