42 Astoundingly Useful Scripts and Automations for the Macintosh

Safari 14.0.3 fixes Services bug

Services that replace text in web page text fields work, again, in Safari 14.0.3.

Jerry Stratton, February 6, 2021

Bug Alert (Green): Bug fixed icon.; bug

A quick note that I’ve just got the update of Safari from 14.0.2 to 14.0.3, and Quick Actions that replace text inside of Safari text fields are now working again.

I’ve removed the “Copy to Clipboard” workaround (so that I no longer erase text previously copied to the clipboard) from the three scripts that I use most often in Safari, and am having no problem editing and modifying text inside of text fields.

I was getting worried that this was a permanent change, and am very happy that it turned out to really be a bug and not deliberate. It’s more than a little disappointing that the bug didn’t get caught before it went out—as both a programmer and a writer, I find Services in Safari text fields extraordinarily useful. I use it often enough that I noticed it within a few hours of performing the update. In fact, I’m using it right now. When I’m done writing this short note, I’ll run my Markdown to Blog HTML service on the text to convert simplified Markdown to the simplified HTML I use for posting.

I don’t use all of my Services scripts on a daily basis, but I do use at least one of them every day.

This is with Safari on Catalina 10.15.7. I should be updating to Big Sur soon, for varying definitions of “soon”, but would expect (or hope) that it’s either also been fixed or was never a problem on Big Sur.

In response to Safari 14 disables Automator Quick Actions in text fields: As of the September 17 release of Safari 14 for macOS Catalina, Automator can no longer replace text in text fields, such as in forums and blog comments. Here are some workarounds.

  1. <- Safari Services workaround