The bMighty Blog -- Apple

Sometimes things go wrong with Macs, and when they do, it can be ugly. Even though we Apple fans tend to pretend (to ourselves and others) that the platform is perfect, it's not.

Take my adventure this morning on my everyday Mac OS X 10.5.2 "Leopard" desktop. I went to launch Safari, and the icon bounced once in the dock and then stopped. Clicked it again. Bounced, stop. Clicked it again. Bounced, stopped.

Hmm. That's not a good sign.

Rebooted. That'll solve it right? Clicked Safari. Bounced, stop. Now I'm getting annoyed. A "civilian" (i.e., non-technical end user) would be worried and beginning to panic.

Opened up the Console application, which shows system log files and error messages. You can find Console inside your Applications/Utilities folder. It reported

4/25/08 6:15:53 AM Safari[268] Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting
4/25/08 6:15:53 AM com.apple.launchd[154] ([0x0-0x19019].com.apple.Safari[268]) Exited with exit code: 1

That wasn't very informative! Fortunately, I have several browsers on the machine, so I fired up Firefox and googled for error message, "Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting." There were very few posts, most were older, and none of the ones I look at were helpful. (A nib file contains definitions of a Mac OS X application's user interface elements.)

Maybe it's a permissions problem, I thought, and ran Repair Disk Permissions within the Disk Utility (also in Applications/Utilities). Under Unix (and Mac OS X is a flavor of Unix), every file is assigned specific permissions, which indicates which accounts and processes can access it. Sometimes they get messed up, especially after Apple provides a software update.

Tried Safari again, after Repair Disk Permissions found (and fixed) a few minor problems. No dice.

Feeling really annoyed now, but then decided to download and reinstall the latest version of Safari from the Apple site. There are only a few parts of Mac OS X which can be downloaded and installed separately, but Safari is one of them. Fortunately, that did the trick: Safari launched and seems stable.

What happened? I don't know, but am guessing that one or more of Safari's files became corrupted. (We don't know if there were other bad nibs or other files, since Safari stopped after encountering one bad file.) Fortunately, it happened to Safari, which is easily repairable, so all I lost was about 30 minutes of time.

But what if it happened to Address Book, or System Preferences, or another key part of the operating system that's not available for separate download? It probably would have required reinstallation of Mac OS X, which can be both time-consuming and traumatic.

Lessons we can learn from this:

1. Things can still go wrong with a Mac, even if you're an expert and take vitamins every day. We Mac owners should be careful with that smug, superior look on our faces.

2. In a business environment, at least some support staff should have a technical understanding of how Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings work, for when things do go wrong like this.

3. Shame on Apple for not doing a better job with error messages. Having an application's icon bounce, and then stop, does not provide adequate information to the end user. How about an error message, folks, so that the end user knows what to do next?

4. It's a wise idea to have multiple browsers installed - just in case one doesn't work.

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