I did a web project years ago where if you hit a particular URL on the site an admin action is triggered.
I have a bookmark in Safari even to this day for the url of that action.
Yesterday that action was unexpectedly triggered for the first time in years.
A review of the Apache Server access logs reveals that the action was requested by my IP address.
The user agent string as recorded in the Apache Server logs is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/601.7.7 (KHTML, like Gecko)
This looks a lot like Safari, but when I actually hit the same site with Safari, Apache Server logs a slightly longer user agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/601.7.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.1.2 Safari/601.7.7
I usually use Chrome but I did launch Safari on the day of the incident. A visit to the URL trigger does not appear in my Safari history however.
Could some other webkit process from my Mac have visited this page without my knowledge/intention?
Like, is there any pre-load of bookmarks function? Or hover over a link pre-fetches the contents for later display? (I don't remember hovering over any links)…
I'm on El Capitan and Safari 9.1.2 (but you knew that from the log lines).
Best Answer
You might have experienced Safari's Top Sites feature. It tries to keep an up-to-date cache of pages in the Top Sites list, which includes a thumbnail rendering of the site.