One thing that wasn’t talked about during last week’s keynote and Leopard preview that I desperately hoped would be a major topic was the Finder. I think most Mac users will agree that, for such an important part of the operating system, the Finder frankly sucks ass. I’m not speaking about spatialness or interface, I’m speaking about basic functionality. Somewhere on the net, I posted this recipe that I’ve found to be a sure fire way to crash the Finder on my machine:
- Mount an AFP network volume.
- Put my PowerBook to sleep.
- Move out of range of my wireless network, such as going to work form home.
- Wake my PowerBook and attempt to use the Finder. Instant spinning ball! The only way out that I’ve found is to hard restart the machine. And yes, I’ve waited upwards of 20 minutes in the past for the Finder to recover. Relaunching the Finder has never worked for me either.
So what should happen? The Finder should quickly realize the network volume isn’t available and dismount it, causing no interruption to the user. Mac OS is probably the most stable OS I’ve used, which is what makes the flaky Finder so disappointing and aggravating.
Here’s another Finder oddity I discovered this evening: I mounted an AFP network volume, and after some time, I put my PowerBook to sleep. When I woke it up, I couldn’t eject the volume. I could read and write, but not eject. Thankfully, the Finder didn’t hang making the machine useless, as in my previous example. The only way I could dismount the volume was to logout and login again. Completely unacceptable.
Here’s to hoping that Leopard will FTFF. An otherwise excellent operating system deserves better than a flaky file manager such as the Finder in its current incarnation.
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August 13th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
I watched your appearance on Your Mac Life the other night and remember the discussion about the finder. I’m glad to see an actual example of this now. I don’t use afp network volumes, so that explains why I’ve never encountered this. It might just be a matter of the way my wife & I use our machines, but I can’t recall the Finder crashing more than 2 or 3 times over the past year. Even then, it just immediately restarts, and I keep going along like nothing happened. Could it be that the annoying instabilities are in features that a lot of people don’t use, thus explaining the relative dearth of vocal complaints about the finder?
I would love to read a few more examples of Finder crashes. You sound exacerbated, as though it crashes all the time. I don’t doubt that it’s happening, I would just like to know what other sort of crashes you’re seeing. Neither I, nor anyone else in my family (some of whom admittedly tinker with things they shouldn’t be) sees any major instability.
It’s just like Shawn’s complaints about Safari constantly crashing. I’ve never seen it be anything but rock solid. Is it just me?
August 14th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Unfortunately, it’s not really the Finder that’s crashing… it’s a much more fundamental part of the operating system. You can tell because other applications also start freezing (especially when you use Open.. or Save..). The command line also freezes if you try to do anything useful with it in this scenario. The most visible part is Finder crashing, but that’s just because it’s waiting on data it’ll never receive from the lower depths of the OS.
This kind of behaviour has been a problem with UNIX-based OSes for as long as I can remember. The problem is that the UNIX model is designed with the assumption that all filesystems (discs, CD-ROMs, Network shares, etc.) are always available, and there isn’t a good failure mode for when that’s not true. It’s quite easy to hose a proper, full-on UNIX server by disconnecting a mounted NFS server, unless it’s been carefully configured.
For what it’s worth, AFP shares seem to mess up OS X less than SMB, NFS and WebDAV (iDisk) shares do, in my experience. I sometimes have to reboot my mac solely to get rid of lingering mount commands that have failed, just because the remote server isn’t contactable for whatever reason.
So, it’s more like “Fix the f’n Operating System”, although that’s admittedly less catchy. In the meantime, I think there’s some software around that will close idle server connections, which might make the problem a little less frequent.
August 14th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Obi-Wandreas…
I’ve read quite a number of complaints about the Finder over the years, and of course I have no links to back that up.
I’d bet if you cruise any Mac-related forum you’ll find more people who have had bad Finder experiences.
Not all the time, but enough to be very annoying. I use network mounts at home and at work and via VPN, and all I need to do is forget to dismount one volume one time and my machine is hosed until I restart. I’m cautious enough that I haven’t lost any data, but on an otherwise very reliable machine and OS, it’s aggravating, and it seems like something that could be fixed.
I’ll document them here as they happen
Safari has been rock solid for me too, and when Shawn first told me about his Safari problems almost two years ago, I figured it must be something he was doing. I took a look at his machine (and him using it) and he’s not exaggerating. I dunno if he has some kind of bad karma or what, but his Safari crashes at the drop of a hat and I couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with it in the short time I had to look. I’m at a total loss to explain his weirdness (with Safari ;))
Tom..
Do you know which part specifically? I’m curious to know.
The difference, at least in my situation, between the Finder crashing and other applications crashing is that I can force quit those other applications without having to hard restart the machine, whereas with the Finder, its crash makes the entire machine unusable. Once the Finder is hung, other apps like Mail and Safari continue to work, but I can’t start any other apps or open any files, as you pointed out. In other words, the Finder is the one application that screws everything else, whereas other apps quit or are killed without trouble.
Wow, that’s just amazing to me. And stupid.
Yep, I’ve had to do that too. I forget where I read it, but there’s a problem of some kind with SMB and Dell switches, and since my VPN for work passes through a Dell switch, I sometimes end up with a mount point in /Volumes that never shows up as a volume on the desktop, and the only solution is… reboot!
I don’t care what it is so long as they fix it.
August 20th, 2006 at 5:30 am
Have you tried to use PathFinder from http://www.cocoatech.com already? That would fix a lot of problems!
August 29th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Last evening, I mounted an AFP share on an OS X 10.4.7 server to perform a backup. I put my laptop to sleep without dismounting the drive. This morning, I awakened my notebook from sleep at a different physical location where the mounted AFP share couldn’t be reached. I didn’t realize the volume was still mounted when I tried to perform a Spotlight search. It returned no results, and the spinner kept spinning. Then I pointed to my Dock, and it didn’t react. I realized the volume was still mounted, so I tried to eject it. No such luck - there was no reaction from the machine. So I tried to log out, and the Dock and the menu bar went away, but the menu bar icons stuck around, and the machine just sat there. As usual, when there’s a Finder problem, the only way out was to power down the machine.