Typing ‘File:///’ crashes apps in OS X Mountain Lion

What if I say typing a string of 8 characters can actually crash almost every application on your Mac? The string is ‘File:///’ (without quotes, and it’s case-sensitive). Sounds weird, right? Give it a try now.

While Mountain Lion has been released long time ago, a bug submission to Open Radar has got attention from a lot of OS X users. Apparently, this bug makes apps crash whenever the user types ‘File:///’ into a text field of any app – that even includes Spotlight.

So what is triggering this? It’s the OS X’s built-in spell checker (if you type continuously without stopping, it won’t crash as OS X will only do a spell check when you stop typing).

Now, this isn’t a big problem at all, as no one’s going to actually type that string unknowingly. Though, if you want to get rid of the bug, just disable spell checking and text replacement from the System preferences app.

It’ll be interesting to see how fast Apple’s going to release a patch for this.