window bind POPSTATE

In webkit the popstate event is fired on page load. To avoid this, this easy work around works for me:

Every time I fire history.push(...) I add the class historypushed to the body-tag:

history.push(...);
$("body").addClass("historypushed");

When I trigger the popstate event, I check for this class:

$(window).bind('popstate', function(e) {
 if($("body").hasClass("historypushed")) { 
  /* my code */ 
 } 
});

There was a bug in Webkit that incorrectly implemented the "popstate" event. Check out this simple post explaining the problem (cool little show and tell): http://www.bcherry.net/playground/pushstate

My suggestion would be to implement your own "popstate" event tracker for Safari. Something like this:

$(window).load(function(){
  function fire_popstate(){
    $(this).trigger("popstate"); // fire it when the page first loads
  }
  var lasthash = window.location.hash;
  setInterval(function(){
    var currenthash = window.location.hash;
    if(lasthash != currenthash){
      fire_popstate();
    }
  }, 500);//check every half second if the url has changed
});

You could wrap that statement in a browser test to check for safari. Even better see if "popstate" has been fired by the time the DOM is ready and then apply the inner function to replace the implementation. The one thing you don't want to happen is have two popstate events to be fired (duplicating your event handler logic, great way to lock up the UI).