WHY IS SAFARI SO SLOW?

Same here!

Camino is a little better for me but on the whole web browsing is slooooooooooow

Try this:

Empty Safari's cache (from the Safari menu), then close Safari.

Go to Home/Library/Safari and delete the following files:

form values
download.plist

Then go to Home/Library/Preferences and delete

com.apple.Safari.plist

Repair permissions.

Start up Safari again, and things should have improved.

For most of us, Safari 3 is the fastest ever.

I assume "Home" is finder? When I went into finder, then Library, I didn't see Safari. When I went to Finder/Library/Preferences, I didn't see com.apple.Safari.plist. My system is extremely slow, also.

Thanks for your help.

I assume "Home" is finder

No!

'Home' is where all your folders are, one level below the hard disk.

mrvic --

When you open up Finder,
there should be a little house icon on the left, with your account name on it.
That is called the Home folder.

And just to reinforce that it really is called "Home" (not some goofy name we all made up in this thread 😉 ) you can also access your Home folder in the Finder by clicking on the "Go" menu and choosing "Home."

This is the Home folder for the currently logged in user. Each user on your Mac (if there are more than one) has his own Home folder.

Hi

I am not sure if this helps but I have a similar problem and went through all the usual checks. Then a friend suggested I test my broadband connection via www.speedtest.net. I was staggered to find that I was getting only 1mb download speed on an 'up to 8mb' UK ISP.

May be worth checking.

Jon

I find that just emptying the catch works wonders for safari speed, which can slow down to a crawl otherwise (many spinning beach ball of death moments). What does deleting those lines do in addition? Do I stop storing form values altogether or do I just get rid of currently stored ones?

agree -- compared to windows the whole internet experience on os x (since 10.3.9) has been really pathetic.

safari has truly degraded to slow, slower, slowest and is so undependable it get lots of stalls, page load failures, interminable beach balls and buggy NSURL failures, the whole system has degraded in terms of speed and performance -- i don't care if it looks pretty if it's as slow and sluggish as it has become over time. really. compared to my mom's ancient windows xp dell box my imac g5 runs like a slow lumbering dinosaur. when are they going to improve that ?(reviews already show that 10.5 does not improve performance)

camino works better. but it's hampered by the osx lookupd and network bugs that have failed to be fixed for about 3-5 years.

and doing all those suggested tweaks below (which work for about 5 minutes and should not be required every other day - they should be rare if ever occurrences) doesn't get to the heart of the problem which is that it's full of memory leaks and poor coding along with the known lookupd and cache performance failures and apparently nobody cares to actually fix it after all these years since it's still occurring. i just don't get it.

i bet this post gets deleted too.

Hi Jon

Which ISP?

On Tesco.net I got 130Kb/sec download speed out of their 'up to 1Gb/sec'. (USB modem)

Since changing to BT Broadband I get 5.3 Gb/sec out of their 'up to 8 Gb/sec", which is highly satisfactory, since when they tested my phone line/location they said that I would probably get 4.5 Gb/sec. (Ethernet router)

Considering that the two deals cost exactly the same I am a relatively happy bunny!

I am having the same problem, safari is so slow and keeps crashing. Have emptied the cahce, deleted cookies but it makes no difference. I am using it via a broadband wireless network, which works fine on my pc. Does anyone have any other suggestions I can try?

I don't know why it is slow but when loading a page, if the blue bar sticks going across the URL, click in the white space just past the URL and then hit return to start the load again. It often speeds up dramatically (I've got Safari 3.0.3)

Thanks I will give that a try and see if it makes any difference.