Safari 18.0 Breaking Classic Editor

Here’s a quick temporary fix:

Create a new css stylesheet and add these two styles:

#postbox-container-2 { clear: left; }

.index-php #postbox-container-2 { clear: none; }

Save the style sheet to your computer. Open safari, go to settings and select advanced. Look for the setting drop down for “Style sheet:” and select the css file you just saved to your computer.

Those are the styles that are breaking the layout. Adding it to safari’s advanced settings tab will override/add that style to the page and will fix the layout. The first style fixes the floating issue. Since that postbox-container-2 style is also used on the dashboard, adding that second line will restore the clear on the admin dashboard page. Once the plugin is update with the correct CSS, you can remove the stylesheet you added.

You can also load those styles to the admin through you theme’s functions file if you know how to do that

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by conartstudio.

Possibly an easier fix, although I’m not sure this will work for everyone because I’m still not sure exactly what the problem is.

I have two sites with fairly similar configurations (same theme, mostly same plugins), and I found that on one the layout was broken but on the other it wasn’t.

I found I can just drag the metaboxes into the main column and they’ll stay there. Since WordPress “remembers” your preferences for metabox positions, the fix sticks. (Of course, it’s on a per-user basis.) On the site where the screen was rendering OK, I must have already manually moved the metaboxes around so WP had settings saved for me there but not in the other site.

One snag I found is that I have an Advanced Custom Fields field group set to “seamless” so the metabox title bar/drag area is not shown. So that one, I can’t move.

Anyway, just one more time I want to say it’s almost certainly not Safari’s “fault” this is happening. Something may have gotten changed in the rendering engine, but it’s much more likely that that was an intentional change that just happens to be revealing an existing bug in the plugin’s code that other browsers are more forgiving of. (It’s not as much of an issue anymore but in decades past it was an extremely common thing to discover code worked fine in one browser and not in another, because the different rendering engines were more or less forgiving of HTML/CSS coding errors, especially before standards got established.)

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by room34.

Just in case it’s helpful, following @conartstudio’s suggestion just drop the following code into your theme’s functions.php file and it should patch the issue for you, clients, everyone:

add_action('admin_head', 'my_custom_css');

function my_custom_css() {
	echo '<style>
		#postbox-container-2 { clear: left; }
		.index-php #postbox-container-2 { clear: none; }
	</style>';
}

Obviously it would be better if the plugin itself were patched to resolve the issue.

I reached out to Jen Simmons on the Developer Experience team at Apple via Mastodon.

Jen has confirmed that the issue is due to a bug introduced in Safari 18 and a bug report has been filed on the WebKit bug tracker, see WebKit#280063. A minimal reproduction has been created by the WebKit team.

I’ve created a drop-in hotfix plugin that adds the same fix for easy installation: https://github.com/aaronmeder/wp-classic-editor-safari-18-fix

Hi, all ???? As discussed in the related Trac issue, a workaround for this issue has been added to the plugin, and it would be great if you could help by testing to confirm it works with Safari 18.0 (and perhaps a confidence check with other browsers under macOS Sequoia). Please share your results on the issue in Github ????

You can test the fix by downloading a zip of trunk and updating locally, or directly in the browser using this Playground test link. Thanks!

I’m seeing the same thing. It looks like the new version of Safari has an issue with float CSS. I don’t think it’s a WordPress thing. If you inspect the elements that have float, remove the float styles, add them back in, everything looks the way it should. Of course after you reload the page things are broken again. Apple needs to fix safari in this case I believe.

As another temporary work around you can switch the layout under the Screen Options menu to the single column.

@ironprogrammer Thanks for the link… I tested this and it seems to work.

Interestingly… I was having this layout issue in Safari on a site that doesn’t have Classic Editor installed, but that does use Advanced Custom Fields for the fields on a Custom Post Type that hides the main editor window. I installed this version of Classic Editor on that site and it resolved the issue there too!

Anyway, my point is that while this issue obviously does affect Classic Editor, I realize now that it’s not specifically limited to it. Might be a WordPress core issue.

It’s definitely a Safari issue, not a WordPress issue: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280063

But, it might be quicker for developers on this end to create workarounds than it is for Apple to issue a whole OS update to address the Safari bug. ??

Advanced Custom Fields may be using elements of the classic editor, which might be why it’s affected too. I recommend reporting this to them at https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/advanced-custom-fields/ and make sure to give them the link to the Safari bug so they have a good idea of what they’re dealing with.

The Safari 18.0 workaround has been officially released in the plugin directory: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/classic-editor/.

Thank you, everyone, for your testing! I’ll mark this topic resolved.

Same for me! How have you solved? Thank you in advance!

@tofupalwp update the plugin

Thank you so much, I didn’t see the answer by Brian!