chrisruzin.net :: Latest Safari Slow? (January 4, 2004)

No problems like that with Safari on this end. It seems to run a little bit smoother with each update.

I do however, get quite irritated at Apple when the mpeg2 codecs don’t work properly whenever there is a new Quicktime update. The best way I have found around that problem, is to leave at least one external drive still running the previous version.

No speed issues with Safari under 10.3.2. It probably is the website you are visiting has some non-standard code connected to it, or you need to repair permissions with Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility. Any third party hacks you have installed could also affect Safari’s speed.

It must be you, none of the things you cite happening occur on any of the Macs that I admin and own.

I was wondering the same thing. I wasn’t sure if it was my airport or safari, but ever since I upgraded to Panther it has been sooo slow.

yup, I think it’s a memory leak. The longer safari is on (and the more open pages) the slower it gets, until it gets so slow I have to close all open pages and start over. That seems to fix it w/o having to restart the app.

You’re not using PithHelmet for ad blocking, are you? The older versions had some problems causing delays switching between tabs. Time for an update if you’re using it.
I personally don’t see any lack of speed, even on my ancient PowerBook G3/500.

Definitely an issue with Safari at present – I’d agree with the memory leak. Download and run Firebird on the same sites and you’ll see a HUGE difference in performance – they used to be pretty close.

I don’t know what PithHelmet is, I am using safari’s popup blocking feature. Something else that occurred to me: I was using FileVault, and I think that was contributing to some general system slowness. If Safari uses a folder in your home dir somewhere for caching and you had FV on…

I have found that Firebird outshines anything else on the horizon…including all of the revisions of Safari so far. It’s lightning fast, and pretty good at rendering pages correctly. Give it a spin….!

FileVault is a great idea but there’s an inescapable performance hit related to encrypting/decrypting files in the home dir everytime they’re used. Apps that do a lot of disk access in the home dir will be affected. If Safari puts its cache files there…

I’ve noticed that ever since I turned off FileVault everything about Safari is faster: tab switching, bookmark menu activation, etc.

What is the latest version of Safari, is it 1.1.1 or is there something after that?

I’ve also found the latest Safai to be unsufferably slow. On certain websites it even lags when typing in textboxes. The top command reports enormous VSIZE, on the order of 100-200 MBytes, and I suspect the application must have a memory leak somewhere. This, coupled to the meagre (but maximum) 640 MBytes of RAM in my PowerBook, means that inevitably performance is going to be awful.

Safari Slow. I have been told that this does not make sense, but I have experienced it first hand. It seems that Safari is slower depending on certain types of connections. At home when I use Time Warner Road Runner broad band Cable Safari gets hung up all the time. I can take my same lap top on the road and use other broad band cable connections and not have the problem. That might be why only some people are experiences the problem.

Go to Safari—> Preferences—>AutoFill—> Edit [Other forms] and hit “Remove All.”

Bob’s your uncle.

USE FIREFOX 1.0 IT IS FREE AND NEVER GETS HUNG UP LIKE SAFARI.

I also have been frustrated by the above mentioned Safari slow-down.
On my 667 Titanium PowerBook (1GB) it seems like Safari 1.2.4 on Mac OS 10.3.7 is extremely slow in downloading icons and graphics and waits until the last graphic loads to render the page. On the same DSL connection, Firefox is that much faster!
Hope they’ll fix it soon.

I am the QA lead for a tab heavy wed site. I am in no way a platform snob. I own both Macs and Windows based PCs. The difference between my Win/IE and my Mac/Safari is so dramatic that I can hardly stand it. Mac/IE is also is considerably faster then Mac/Safari. I now think of Safari as a POS. My user base is overwhelmingly Mac based this will dramatically affect there workflow negatively. As a test I compared Apples Site on both sides the PC was about 3 times as fast. Come on Apple this is very frustrating

How many of you (us) have the “debug” menu enabled. This is the drop down menu that would appear just to the right of the “help” menu item. It usually takes a 3rd part application or script to activate it but I did so quite a while ago so that I could use my online-banking… their server complained if my browser didn’t respond that it was IE or Netscape but from the “debug” menu you can enable this.

Anyway, I was advised by my Mac-head brother-in-law to disable this and I think that it may have helped. Time will tell.

Btw, I disabled it by closing Safari completely, opening a terminal session, and typing “defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 0”. Then I launched Safari and voila, no more debug menu. Also, if you want to turn it back on you can substitute a ‘1’ for the zero in that series of commands.

Please let us know if this helps.

I Have noticed an improvement in the speed with the most recent update to 10.3.8
I am wondering if this is just me or are any of you experiencing the same?