Why does File:/// crash my app?

Whenever I type File:/// into the URL bar in Chrome, into Text Edit, and more, it crashes the app. I found out about this after reading this blog post.

How can I avoid this crash and make it impossible for apps that get this string whether it's typed, pasted or arrives in a file, message or download?

Solution 1:

It's a bug in 10.8.1 and 10.8.2 only.

The workaround for this pesky bug is to disable two items in Language & Text Preference Pane in System Preferences on affected versions of Mountain Lion:

• Select (click) on Text in the middle towards the top of the window
• deselect (uncheck) "Correct spelling automatically"
• deselect (uncheck) "Use symbol and text substitution"

Credit for this workaround goes to user shess on the open radar web site.

Solution 2:

bmike has the workaround, I'll provide the "why": According to this article from TheNextWeb, a feature called Data Detectors, which scans text for meaningful formats (dates, locations...) also looks for file URLs. It does this by looking for "file://", case-insensitive. However, later in the procedure, it asserts that the string should start with "file://" lowercase -- and when this is not the case, such as when there is a capital F, it throws an exception, which apparently (and extremely sloppily) brings down the whole application.