I left them all downloading and updating but one, the Safari update, refused to work. It said I had insufficient access rights but considering I’m the only user and I’ve always been setup as an administrator this was strange.

I tried repairing disk permissions but that didn’t work. Then I thought perhaps it just needs to be restarted having just installed all the other updates so I dutifully rebooted and the same thing happened when I rebooted.

The Update Safari can’t be saved. You do not have appropriate access privileges. The installer package has been moved to the Trash. To try again, open the package from the Finder.

I checked the Trash and there was nothing in there so I had a root around and found an easy solution…using Finder to browse my hard drive I navigated to /Library/Updates/

and then deleted the Safari folder that was in there:

and then tried to install the Safari update again from the Software Update window and it downloaded and installed the update without a problem.

I knew I was typing my password 100% correctly so I thought it might be a strange cookie or cached file problem so I cleared Safari’s history, quit and restarted Safari but the same thing kept happening.

I thought Facebook might be having an few glitches but I opened up Firefox and it logged me in straight away.

After lot’s of hair pulling I finally found the reason I couldn’t log in to Facebook using Safari and I’ve been kicking myself for not realising sooner….I noticed Private Browsing was activated in Safari. My computer gets used by a variety of people during the day so when I come to do any online banking I sometimes turn on Private Browsing and am normally very good at remembering to turn it back off. However, on this occasion I had forgotten to turn off Private Browsing and that was the cause of Facebook failing to login and constantly cycling me back to the login page.

I know this seems obvious once it’s pointed out, and other sites sometimes pop up warnings stating Cookies are not enabled, etc which would normally prompt you to check Private Browsing options but Facebook give’s no warnings or errors in a pop-up or on the re-loaded login page.

I have since turned on Private Browsing and tried to log in to Facebook and it worked fine, so I’m not sure why it wasn’t working before but turning off Private Browsing was definitely the cure.