Clicking Safari 5.1 select menu refreshes page

I also was experiencing the page reload / session clearing bug.

So here's what I found with some pointers from your answers...

On a page I was using GoogleFonts, and applying the CSS like so:

body, p, ol, ul, td, input, textarea, select, option {
  font-family: 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica', 'Arial', sans-serif;
  font-size:   12px;
  line-height: 17px;
}

It seems Safari hates when you apply web fonts to select or option tags. Changing the code to this made the problem go away.

body {
  font-family: 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica', 'Arial', sans-serif;
  font-size:   12px;
  line-height: 17px;
}

Final Answer:

I found a final fix for the problem we were specifically having on our site. After the site loads, we have the TypeKit library attaching fonts to the page. When I specifically set the font-family property on the select boxes to something other than the TypeKit font, the refresh behavior no longer presents itself.

I'm not sure if you're using TypeKit or not, but that would be a good place to look first.

---

Original Answer:

I encountered this issue as well today on one of the sites that my company runs. I had narrowed it down to a set of CSS rules that were most likely causing it (commenting those out would not produce the bug on page reload).

The main issue I see with this could very well be a security issue in the browser itself. If you have any open sessions in any tabs, it will clear their session data as well.

Find a page that has this bug, and open several other tabs where you log into a Google account, or some other set of accounts. When you click the select boxes on the site with the bug, the page is refreshed, and the sessions in the other tabs are reset as well.

Update: I have narrowed down the set of CSS rules that are affecting our page. Any one of these CSS rules will cause this behavior:

• -webkit-appearance
• border
• border-style
• border-radius
• -webkit-border-radius
• background-repeat
• background-position
• background-image

I had originally thought that it was the -background-image property that was causing issues, as we're using a data image, instead of an actual png or jpg (to give a style similar to the default in Firefox), but I was apparently wrong.

Update 2: I tried using CSS resets to put things back to normal using a webkit-specific CSS hack, but just touching any of these CSS rules seems to cause things to go haywire. I guess we will need to just remove the rules until there is a fix for this.

Update 3: It seems to have something to do with the Javascript being loaded on the page. If I disable Javascript in Safari, this does not happen.

You should file a bug report: https://bugs.webkit.org/

That way, the bug will (hopefully!) get fixed so that future developers will never chance upon it.

---

This issue has since been fixed a while ago: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=65350