Safari (for Windows) did an update about a year or so ago in which they no longer honored sessions across multiple tabs from the same website. This effectively broke the game for that browser. I went online and found developers screaming about the change but Apple made it clear that this was a security feature in their opinion and it wasn't going to change. At that time I struggled to find a work around but did not succeed so the game has been essentially broken for the Windows Safari browser ever since. The interesting thing to me however was that none of my Apple computer users reported a problem when using Safari from Apple devices and I tested Safari on various mobile devices and the problem did not occur. I sort of left it on the "things to fix when I can" pile.
If what you say is true then Apple may have decided to update Safari for their native machines to behave the same. This may be a fundamental problem for TBG and Safari browsers. If I cannot preserve a user's session data when they switch from one tab or page to another then I will have to re-authenticate the user for every single page visited. This would make the game nothing short of stupid and be very frustrating. I can only guess that Safari for mobile will go the same route and probably sooner than later.
Perhaps enough time has passed that other web developers have found a work around. I know there are plenty of websites that manage financial transactions that require preservation of session data between pages, or else perhaps they are working strictly on a single page and using JavaScript and AJAX to update the page. Under the circumstance I will probably have to do something like that for the game redesign that is in my plans for right after the mobile release.
Here's what I will do, I don't have an Apple machine to test with but I will put out feelers to see if my hunch is correct. I will also try to see if any work around's are published for Safari for Windows. Lastly I do have an Apple mobile device so I will test it to see if session changes are required on tab changes on that device. In the short run there will be nothing I can do about the problem and I am glad you have found the game to work well in Chrome. That is my development platform so it will always have the least problems. I am sorry about all this and the trouble but there is little I can do about Apple's decisions and I already have a monster of a job keeping up with the four major browsers MSIE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Thank you once again for reporting the problem and sleuthing out the probable cause. I'll see what I can do.
EDIT: I just noticed that none of the barley had started to grow in your screen shot? Does it ever start to grow or is the farm completely frozen? If the farm is frozen then the JavaScript parts of the game have stopped working. This would also mean you would be unable to buy beer or do much of anything. This may be something different in that Apple may have changed how their browser interprets JavaScript coding in their update. If so then this may be something I can find and fix much more easily. Let me know what you observe, thanks. Also if you know how then make sure that your browser settings allow JavaScript (not "Java" although that won't usually hurt you either) code to run. I used to have a bright red warning come up when that browser setting was incorrect but I will need to check and see if that warning is still functional. If you do have JavaScript turned off (or if that is the new default after the browser update) then you will find problems on many other websites as well.Statistics: Posted by Robc — Wed Jul 30, 2014 2:16 pm
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