Exploiting IndexedDB API information leaks in Safari 15

There’s a pretty nasty exploit in Safari 15, where sites/tabs that interact with an IndexedDB database leak that name to other tabs. In Safari 15 on macOS, and in all browsers on iOS and iPadOS 15, the IndexedDB API is violating the same-origin policy. Every time a website interacts with a database, a new (empty) …

Here’s a PNG that will show a different image in Apple Software

This is wild: while writing his own parallel-decodable PNG implementation, David Buchanan discovered he had a bug in his code. Soon after, he found out Apple has the same bug in their implementation which ships with macOS and iOS. As a result, it’s possible to craft a PNG in such a way that Apple’s decoder …

Viewport Unit Based Typography vs. Safari

A common thing to do regarding font-sizing is to use Viewport Unit Based Typography, nowadays often combined with CSS min() or clamp(): :root { font-size: min(calc(1em + 1vw), 4em); } However, as Sara Soueidan details, Safari doesn’t co-operate here: In Safari on macOS, the fluid text wasn’t really fluid—resizing the viewport did nothing to the …

Chrome vs. BlinkMacSystemFont: A Workaround

UPDATE 2020-04-28: Good news everyone! A workaround for this bug has landed in Canary (Chromium 84) and will be merged into the M83 release! The workaround described here still applies for Chromium 81. The problem As detailed before there’s this bug that shipped with Chromium 81 which somehow prevents the font-weight CSS property from being …

Automatically Fix Bluetooth Audio Balance Drift in macOS with “Balance Lock”

It’s been over 10 years that I’ve been using macOS (then OS X) and every now and then I notice that the audio balance of my Bluetooth headset is off for no apparent reason. Hmm, why is the balance for my headphone suddenly off? Back in 2014 I was lucky enough to see this tweet …

Chrome vs. WordPress: All Text Showing as Glyphs / Symbols 🤯

Ever since mid december I’ve had a few reports from people that they were seeing my blog – the thing you’re reading now – rendered in unreadable text. Instead of seeing a nice serif font, they got presented with some wingdings-like symbols for all the text when visiting through Chrome on macOS. Hmm, unreadable on …

iTunes auto-rating all played tracks …

For more than a year it’s been bugging me that iTunes “sometimes” would auto-rate played tracks. It happened on some albums, yet not all albums. Back in May 2018 I posted this video on YouTube showing the behaviour: As you can see iTunes here automatically rates “En Masse” (track 10) from the moment it starts …