A Very Painful Bug

I'll lead off this post by listing all of the various things I thought might have caused this bug, and related phrases that I Googled in the hopes that it will lead some poor soul chasing the same issue to this post, thus shaving 2-3 points off that person's long-term systolic blood pressure.

• Facebook authentication mobile safari crash
• jQuery mobile Facebook crash mobile safari
• Mobile safari crash switching windows
• mobile firebug
• Mobile safari ios crash logs
• Understanding ios crash logs
• ios crash webthread javascript
• juggernaut crash mobile safari
• socket.io mobile safari crash

Basically, there is a problem with how Safari handles websocket connections. It manifests clearly when, on a mobile device, a page spawns a child window for something like Facebook authentication (or any Oauth flow). When the browser returns to the parent window after authenticating, Safari will completely crash - or, at least, most of the time it will completely crash. In this case there was a frustrating dependency that made the bug not 100% reproducible.

After hours of debugging (you know you're getting desperate when you resort to binary-searching for the bug by systematically commenting out half your JavaScript...) and Googling, I found this comment on github which describes the symptoms perfectly.

I was experiencing it specifically with a connection spun up by Juggernaut, which is based on socket.io. The solution in my case was simple - just prior to making the FB.login() authentication call, I explicitly close Juggernaut's websocket and unsubscribe the client from my PubSub channels:

jug.io.socket.disconnect();
jug.unsubscribe("myChannel");

And then reconnect everything when I return from the Facebook auth call:

jug.io.socket.connect();
jug.subscribe("myChannel", callBackFn);

Works like a charm, though good god it was painful to identify.