Safari giving “kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 303” when visiting a site

Question

I am currently having problems visiting archive.org

example link

Safari 12 (and 13 b4) on Mojave shows the following error:

kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 303

Things I've tried:

• disable all extensions
• Develop > Empty Caches
• trashing Safari.plist
• booting into Safe Mode
• recovery mode + Disk Utility First Aid
• different DNS servers

All have had no effect.

Strangely, the problem does not appear in Safari Technology Preview, Chrome, Opera or Tor.

Answer 1

OK, this solution is the strangest thing. I found the solution on a Russian site, but now that the search terms for the solution are known you can find at some other sites.

The problem is a result of Safari holding too much local data for the site in question and failing to deal with that correctly. I use archive.org a lot so I had lots of LocalStorage and Cookie data for that site. The fact that this data is only in Safari, and none of my other browsers explains why they could browse the site just fine.

So, the solution:

• Go into Safari > Preferences > Privacy
• Search for "archive.org"
• Click Remove
• The problem goes away

Here's a video showing the problem before and after: https://imgur.com/gallery/d1P1FCi

I've reported this to Apple with full logs as radar #14814758.