Mountain Lion text bug causes apps to crash

By Richard Mallion
A text entry bug has been discovered in Mountain Lion which causes most apps to crash.
The bug is this:
If you open an app that supports text entry, for instance TextEdit, and type in:

The app will shortly crash. The capital F is important.
I have tried this with many applications such as Mail, Messages and Safari. In fact when writing this blog Safari quit on me 🙂 Some apps seem immune, such as Firefox.
The bug seems to be with the way Mountain Lion uses it data detectors service. This service scans for pieces of data such as urls, dates, addresses etc and makes them actionable.
The File***/ url is a recognisable and useable url but normally has a lower case f, the upper case F seems to be causing this service problems.
This is quite a dangerous bug. If someone sends you, for instance, an email or a message with this piece of text then the app reading it will most likely crash.
Hopefully Apple will fix this asap.