iPhone Safari Bug Discovered

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The iPhone is far from perfect but then again we never claimed that it has reached perfection. In fact, with every bug and flaw we discover we’re actually contributing to the evolution of any phone, and especially the iPhone. I say the iPhone in particular because, unlike other phones, the iPhone always has a new version coming up next year. That’s why we expect Cupertino to fix everything that users find and to add extra specs and features in the next iPhone model.

What we discovered today is very troubling particularly for those users that don’t have an unlimited data plan bundled with their iPhone. It’s also very damaging for the wallet of those people that happen to travel a lot and use the iPhone in other networks. It’s not a real bug in the true sense of the word but it’s a disturbing issue. It’s basically a flaw found in Safari, but a flaw that seems not to affect all users so far.

It looks like if the user visits a site which uses Motion-JPEG in Safari then the browser will continue to load the page and use bandwidth even after you turn Safari off. Safari runs in the background and it will keep eating and eating your traffic away as it’s streaming the video or live feed.

In order for the issue to be observed you need to actually access such websites with Safari, and, most importantly, surf the web on a pre-pay plan or while roaming. The discoverers of the flaw have consumed 740 megabytes while streaming data silently. That took about an hour and, if it would have been happening to someone without a mobile Internet package, the data would have worked out to about $3,000. Now I’m sure that none of us would like to pay that much for surfing the web, would we?

The good news is that you’re less likely to find yourself in such a situation. And just in case you do like to follow sites that use Motion-JPEG or other refresh methods, make sure you keep Safari busy with a static web page after you finish viewing.

We’ll be curious to see if Apple will address this matter officially. Do hit us up in comments if you’ve experienced anything similar while using the iPhone.