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Level 1

15 points

Laggy Scrolling in Safari with MacBook Pro

The title says it all. Safari 5 is extremely slow scrolling on many webpages. The worst culprit seems to be sites that have flash video (read, any site with ads). Scrolling is extremely slow and jerky.

By comparison, both Chrome and Firefox are perfectly smooth on sites with Flash.

As far as I can tell, Safari uses some sort of hardware acceleration for scrolling. Both Firefox and Chrome peg the CPU pretty good when scrolling (especially with smooth scrolling enabled). Safari hardly uses any CPU when scrolling, but the scrolling performance is terrible. I've done everything obvious — deleted all preference files, used the "Reset Safari" command, tried it without plugins, etc. It's still bad in general, and horrible with flash on pages.

This is a MacBook Pro 2.4 ghz with the GeForce 8600M GT. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

MacBook Pro 2.4 GHZ C2D, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Jun 11, 2010 12:13 PM

67 replies

Jun 12, 2010 10:16 PM in response to gordon142

I'm having the exact same thing happen to me on two different Macs - a 2.8GHz MacBook Pro and a 3.06 GHz iMac. Safari 5 + Flash Player 10.1 (final release) yields choppy scrolling in Safari on many Flash sites. Before I installed Flash Player 10.1, the scrolling was perfectly smooth.

Firefox and Chrome do not have this problem. I'm reinstalling Flash Player 10.0.45.2 for awhile.

Julian_G

Level 1

0 points

Jun 13, 2010 6:49 AM in response to gordon142

I've got the same problem. Laggy scrolling since flash 10.1 and Safari 5. Tried reinstalling flash and repairing disk permissions: no change.

Where can I download flash 10.0?

Jun 13, 2010 8:51 AM in response to Julian_G

You can get the previous version here:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html

Download the zip file and pull out the Mac UB installer for 10.0.45.2.

Jun 13, 2010 9:10 AM in response to Jeffrey Kain

You also have to run an Uninstaller app to get rid of the installed version of Flash before you install the old version:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

Julian_G

Level 1

0 points

Jun 13, 2010 1:58 PM in response to Jeffrey Kain

Thank you!

gordon142 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jun 13, 2010 2:54 PM in response to gordon142

I'm starting to suspect that people reporting that they don't have this issue are actually not using the latest version of Flash (the official release of 10.1). Go to http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html to check your flash version. It should say "*MAC 10,1,53,64*".

I have so far had a 100% success rate repeating this on every Mac I have tried. That would be three MacBook Pros (all different generations), and a Mac Pro. Except for the one MacBook, none of these are my own computers, so I can safely rule out a specific combination of software or plugins that only I might use.

To recap:
Safari 5 + Flash 10.0 = No problems
Safari 4.x + Flash 10.1 = No problems
Safari 5 + Flash 10.1 (10,1,53,64) = Lousy scrolling

If anyone can definitively say that when using: Safari 5, Flash 10,1,53,64 and Mac OS 10.6.3 they are NOT getting this issue, please let me know.

TildeBee

Level 7

31,917 points

Jun 13, 2010 6:42 PM in response to gordon142

Gordon --
I have no idea what you make you think responders are making stuff up here.
I got the release on June 10th.

Adobe Flash Player
10.1 r53 Copyright (c) 1996-2010 Adobe Macromedia Software LLC. All rights reserved

Like I stated before,
I am NOT getting this issue!

gordon142 Author

Level 1

15 points

Jun 13, 2010 8:44 PM in response to TildeBee

~Bee wrote:
Gordon --
I have no idea what you make you think responders are making stuff up here.
I got the release on June 10th.

Adobe Flash Player
10.1 r53 Copyright (c) 1996-2010 Adobe Macromedia Software LLC. All rights reserved

Like I stated before,
I am NOT getting this issue!

Hey,

I don't think anyone is making anything up, I was just concerned that some people might have been using the older version of Flash, which would throw off the results, especially since when I first posted the topic I didn't even realize that the issue was specific to a certain version of flash. I appreciate all responses.

Jun 14, 2010 2:31 AM in response to TildeBee

Just tried this on a model of the first iMac with Intel processor.

2 GHz Core Due with 2 GB RAM

Scrolling was smooth and fine with Safari 5 and Flash 10 but as soon as I installed Flash 10.1 scrolling got choppy (on sites containing Flash).

~Bee,
So you mean you can scroll up and down on http://www.sf.se without choppiness?

TildeBee

Level 7

31,917 points

Jun 14, 2010 6:59 AM in response to star-affinity

That site looks fine here, Martin.

Jun 14, 2010 2:17 PM in response to TildeBee

It looks fine, but doesn't scroll as smooth as before (with Flash 10.0) or as smooth as i Windows in the same machine.

It's not a big issue, but since people spend quite a lot of time browsing the web it's the little things that make a difference, and I think that in the year 2010 there should not be a difference when it comes to browsing Windows compared to Mac.

jmpnz

Level 1

0 points

Jun 15, 2010 8:50 AM in response to gordon142

Macbook Unibody (MacBook6,1) 10.6.3 (10D578) 4GB RAM

I had a problem I would describe the same way. I deleted

Google Earth Plugin.plugin (version 5.0.11738.1858)
Move-Media-Player.plugin (version npmnqmp 071101000050)
WebEx.plugin (version 1.0 )

from ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/

(for now anyway) scrolling has returned to it's normal zippy behavior.

Igor_G5

Level 2

323 points

Jun 15, 2010 10:06 AM in response to gordon142

I've got the version of Flash that you specified. it's really fairly smooth. it's smooth enough for me to read text as I scroll.

Jun 16, 2010 2:21 AM in response to jmpnz

Thanks, but I don't have any of these plug-ins installed.

I can reproduce this on several computers even after a clean install of Mac OS X that I then install Safari 5 and Flash 10.1 on.

Either you who don't say you have a problem don't ”see” it (or isn't bothered) or theres something really dodgy going on. Are we living in different universes perhaps? :P

crutchy

Level 1

36 points

Jun 16, 2010 2:41 AM in response to TildeBee

Hi!

I see that 10.6.4 includes a Safari v. 5 fix for lagging scrolling. Does that improve things? I have not updated to 10.6.4 yet in case there more problems than solutions!

Laggy Scrolling in Safari with MacBook Pro