Safari on iOS crashes whenever I try to type anything into the search field
Deleting my history fixed it for me.

Safari > Bookmarks icon > History tab > Clear

Something in my history was poisoning the search results, and causing Safari to choke whenever you trying to type something into the search field. Since Safari tries to suggest pages that you’ve visited before, if a bad site shows up there, it can (presumably) cause things to go wrong.



In my case, the problem site was particularly bizarre. I dumped a copy of my Safari History using iExplorer before I wiped it, and started looking for unusual entries. These two stood out to me:


Title                 URL                      Visits  Last Visited
Cannot Open Page      &lt;long Facebook url>      -7      14 Aug 2015, 17:16
Cannot Open Page      &lt;long Facebook url>      1       14 Aug 2015, 17:12

The Facebook URL is an authentication page that was apparently launched by an iOS game. I don’t understand how it can be last visited in the future (that date is nearly two months after the problem started) or have negative visits.

I’m genuinely mystified as to how that item entered my history – I barely play the game in question, and I’ve never messed about with the date/time settings on my phone. And I have no idea how you get negative visits – possibly some sort of overflow somewhere?

I think it’s likely that this item was the culprit, but how and why are total mysteries.