14 DAY TRIAL // Daniel Jalkut, founder of Red Sweater Software, is investigating a networking issue in OS X Mountain Lion that he claims is related to the “Auto Proxy Discovery” and “Automatic Proxy Configuration” settings in Network preferences. Apple might have to roll out OS X 10.8.1 really soon to fix the problem.
It’s no mystery that every newly-released piece of software – be it a full-fledged OS designed by the perfectionists at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, Calif. – has a few oversights here and there.
It’s the case with OS X Mountain Lion, the latest major release of Apple’s desktop OS. According to the founder of Red Sweater Software, Daniel Jalkut, the networking module needs a bit of tweaking.
The issue was apparently present in developer builds of Mountain Lion, but Apple has somehow failed to patch it in the interim.
“The public release of Mountain Lion has only confirmed that the problem, while rare, is significantly wide spread that I’m sure it affects at least dozens of my customers, hundreds of the customers of my colleagues, and probably thousands of Mac users worldwide,” writes Jalkut.
“The tell-tale sign of this crash is it occurs only as the app attempts to connect to some network resource, and the crashing thread always culminates in some stack trace involving CoreSchedulingSet or EmptyCoreSchedulingSet C++ objects,” Jalkut explains.
He says even Safari, the OS’s built-in web browser, is vulnerable to these crashes on “affected configurations.”
Jalkut says schools and large companies are more likely to see the problem when connecting to what he refers to as “an institutional network.”
After speaking to Agile Bits, creators of the popular password manager and form filler 1Password, Jalkut could confirm that “this is issue is related specifically to the ‘Auto Proxy Discovery’ and ‘Automatic Proxy Configuration’ settings in Network preferences.”
“If you have one of these options checked, you are very likely to crash in MarsEdit, Safari, Tweetbot, and any number of other apps that rely on Apple’s networking libraries,” he wrote.
Jalkut recommends turning off the Auto Proxy Discovery and Automatic Proxy Configuration features “unless you are on a network where using them is strictly required.” He offers detailed instructions on how to do so.
“In light of the apparent link to a commonly used proxy configuration, and the growing number of apps confirmed as affected by this issue, I am hopeful that we’ll see a fix from Apple sooner than later,” he adds.