For months, I’ve pondered a pesky problem: at random, the address bar (also called the “Toolbar”) in Safari for Mac would disappear. I could bring it back by selecting View/Show Toolbar, but a day or so later my Toolbar would vanish again.
The culprit is a program called Spice Rack from a company called TastyApps.com. In theory, Spice Rack installs plug-ins that enhance the browsing experience, but the Safari plug-in — which creates a Web Snapper button on the Safari Toolbar — is buggy, causing the toolbar to randomly disappear.
The creator of Spice Rack admits as much in this obscure Apple discussion forum thread, but the information is buried on page two of the lengthy discussion about the problem, and the problem (though a solution was posted back in May 2010) hasn’t been marked as solved.
To fix the problem:
1) Go to Safari/Preferences, go to the Extensions tab, and turn Extensions off. (Alternatively, you can delete any reference to Spice Rack or Web Snapper.)
2) Go to System Preferences, right click Spice Rack, and remove it.
There: all better.
Hi! I'm the author of SpiceRack – and Web Snapper… I must say i was a little disappointed to read your article, as you make it sound like we are trying to hide something here at TastyApps. ("The creator of Spice Rack admits as much in this obscure Apple discussion forum thread…")
What you did not say here on your post is that, in that "obscure thread" we do clarify that SpiceRack is not the culprit – it's a bug in that particular version of Web Snapper back in May 2010… So removing SpiceRack is like sand-blasting a cracker. That being said, it is a bit of semantics, I admit. But I just like people to be clear on what the problem is exactly, so we don't start accusing applications that work perfectly fine.
You are right – I did not go back to the thread to say it was fixed – however, the post did say that a beta was in testing, and a new version would be released soon with the official fix. I just don't have the time to go back and post all over the web, unfortunately. But the post does date back 6 months ago, and a lot of new versions have been released since then. The real suggestion here, would have been to first suggest people upgrade Web Snapper to the latest version – a free upgrade, that not only fixes this bug, but also adds new features.
I'm all for people helping people troubleshoot, and for that, I appreciate your post. But as I said, the tone made it sound like we were a sneaky bunch when we are one of the most transparent and helpful team out there in the software biz.
Thanks!
Hi, Jean. Thanks for stopping by.
I stand beside what I actually said, which was that the thread containing your comment is obscure — all but lost in the labyrinth of Apple's support forum postings. That's not a commentary on you or your company; instead, it's an indictment of the poor design of the forum.
It is good to clarify that the culprit is a bug in Web Snapper and not in the Spice Rack plug-in management system, and I'm glad to hear that upgrading Web Snapper fixes the bug. That said: after months of being frustrated by the issue, hours of looking for a fix for it, and discovering that the problem was associated with an app I don't even remember installing and don't use anymore, I was not inclined to go digging for an upgrade or a patch. I wanted that software off my machine, and the fix above accomplishes that.
M.