Safari 3 browser windows refuse to close

Usually when you click on the red “X” button on the top left of a window, it closes. Or, when you press Command-W on the keyboard, which is my preferred choice. But since I updated my Powerbook to 10.4.11, which upgraded Safari to 3.0.4., Safari windows won’t close. No matter what.

My first reaction was “thanks Apple”, but then it turned out the culprit was not our beloved Mac maker company. After checking the ~/Library/InputManagers directory, I found only one folder in there named SIMBL. What was this, I didn’t know, but after deleting it and restarting Safari, I am now able to close it’s windows again!

It turns out that SIMBL is a Smart InputManager Bundle Loader used by some plugins for Safari. It must have gotten there when I installed Taboo, ages ago, which I also deleted now since I don’t need it anymore.

In case you also have the same problem, check out whether any of your Safari plugins is outdated or incompatible with Safari version 3. Take a look at ~/Library/InputManagers for any defective input managers. Also look in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport for the plugins. There are lots of stuff in there, so examine the names and see if you find something strange. Or, open Spotlight and search for “SIMBL”.

Terminal to the rescue

Background

I got my digital camera in 2004 and started making a library with all the photos I took in my vacations, journeys and other occasions with more than 2.5k photographs at this moment. These photos resided only in my Powerbook, which means a single point of failure: if something was to happen to the laptop’s hard drive (or even if I dropped it or it got stolen) all those pictures of memories of last years would be lost.

So I got my new iMac last week and decided to move the entire iPhoto library to the new computer, only to find out that there’s something wrong with the disk that won’t let the copy complete. All I got was the spinning beachball. It wouldn’t stop spinning. I tried to disconnect the network drive, turn airport off, press command-alt-escape to relaunch Finder. Nothing.

Disk problems

So I fired up Disk Utility and verified the Machintosh HD disk to get the following error message:

Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

Apparently there’s something wrong with the filesystem, probably due to hard drive error, since I heard some “weird” sounds coming from the hard drive. How many of my files were affected by this? I don’t know. I tried to copy each one of the subfolders to the new drive, but whenever it encountered a file that was damaged, all I was getting was the beachball, and then I would have to restart the computer, identify the damaged file and copy the rest of them.

The trick

Well, doing this for my entire library could take forever, so I had to find another way to copy the files to the new computer. Apparently, there is damage in the catalog structure of the FS at some point and Finder doesn’t seem to handle this damage nicely - the whole OS is rendered unusable. But how can one copy files bypassing the Finder, when it’s the only app that does such stuff? Think deeper: Darwin.

So I opened a terminal, and used the cp command to copy all of my files to the new computer, i.e.:

Mac:~/Pictures $ cp -rv iPhoto\ Library/ /Volumes/panagiotis

The -r flag tells cp to do a recursive copy (all files and subfolders inside) and I also wanted to witness the process of copying the files, hence the -v flag (for verbose).

Luckily, the copying of the files was smooth. No delays, no freezes. Well it took sime time to transfer about 7GB of data wirelessly to the new computer, and of course the damaged files did not recover, but at least I managed to copy them to a new disk before this one completely fails some day and doom my entire photo library. After scanning quickly through my library from the iMac (thanks Frontrow + remote!) I concluded that very few pictures were damaged - most of my precious memories are still intact.

So, when the Finder fails, summon Terminal to the rescue.