In a blank address bar, not just anywhere. Crashed mine, sure enough, first try. I'm on 16.1 (haven't updated to 16.1.1 yet).

I try to avoid updating my iPhone for as long as humanly possible. I find updates generally bring bugs, features I don’t want, apps I don’t want, and sometimes taking away things I like.

This is the important point I think. Version of Safari is tied to version of OS.

I don't think 16.1.1 is unaffected. I'm on iOS 16.1.1 and can reproduce it. Blank address bar -> "old " -> crash. The second time I didn't need the space, as others have also reported.

It does for me. It's probably a tuple of (Safari, iOS, iPhone) version specific, for a couple of versions of each.

Which search engine are you using?

Looks like I have DDG configured as my default.