I’ve been a QuickBooks user since I started my first company back in 1997. It’s been a love hate relationship mostly because I don’t enjoy working on the books. Recently though, QuickBooks has kicked things up a notch by drop kicking my browser when it prints more than one time.
When I switched to the Mac back in 2006 I wasn’t happy with the Mac version and so I continued to use the Windows version. In 2009-2010 I switched to Quickbooks Online because it looked like the product had become more stable and relable.
Why didn’t I get QuickBooks for Mac? Well, for starters it’s almost $200 and (from what I’ve heard) lacks many of the features found on it’s Windows counterparts. Of course QuickBooks Online charges me a monthly fee, so I suppose it’s all the same in the end.
I have looked for alternatives, trust me. I bought Cha-Ching, but they were acquired by Intuit. I signed up for Mint and they too were acquired by Intuit, but they’ve at least kept the service running. Even today, I did a search on AlternativeTo.net, but I just don’t see any viable alternatives.
There are some great invoicing products out there, like FreshBooks, but I need the full accounting package, not just invoicing.
Why am I so down on QuickBooks? Because of a new little gem that happens every time I need to print more than one item. I can consistently crash QuickBooks Online meaning that my browser completely shits the bed and crashes. What special magic does it require? Simply print more than once. Don’t use Safari you say? Well, the same thing happen in Firefox and Chrome as well. It’s a pain in the ass, but at least it’s consistent.
Here’s a video that will show you how the crash works happens.
QuickBooks Online Crash Issue When Printing from Michael Ashby on Vimeo.
I posted a question in the Intuit Community [link] and was surprised that I got a response. Unfortunately, the response was to call customer support. I’ll be sure to get right on that when I have an hour to waste.
In the meantime, if anyone has any other suggestions, I’m all ears.
Did you try clearing your cache, deleting your Adobe Plugins and allowing popups?
Is Safari you default PDF Viewer?
Katherine — Thanks for the fast comment!
I’ve cleared my cache, I don’t have any Adobe Plugins and popups are enabled.
For Macs, “Preview” is the default PDF viewer. More on Preview here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview_(software)
But I also have PDFPen installed, I should try setting that as the default PDF viewer and see if that fixes things.
Alas, I had the same crashes. 🙁
I switched my default PDF viewer to PDFPen Pro (http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpenPro/) and tried the same print test and was met with the same crash. As best I could tell, it was still using preview, but QBOnline obfuscates the PDF creation, so it’s hard to tell.
You can find the full error report at the following link – http://d.pr/JTG8
I suppose another alternative would be to install Adobe PDF, but I’d rather not if someone can think of another option.
Can’t reproduce your issue in Chrome, at least…irrespective of how many times I click print. Chrome uses it’s own PDF viewer. Make sure Chrome PDF Viewer is enabled in about:plugins.
Also try this for safari –
1] Close Safari
2] In a terminal window type – defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -boolean-neg
2] Delete (if exists) – AdobePDFViewer.plugin from the root /Library/Internet Plug-Ins AND user folder ~/Library/Internet Plugin-Ins
Darth — You’re 100% right about Chrome, no problems at all. I’ll just use that browser for QB Online.
I don’t have any PDF Plugins, but I might turn off the WebKit support for PDF so that it’ll open in my prefered tool, PDFPenPro.
Thanks for the help Darth!