Safari is a RAM-eating monster

As a recent board watcher here while contemplating the iMac, I see a similarity here with what Chrome does to my PC. It ends up using almost all of my resources. I am watching all of the replies with great interest.

I can't disagree with you. I fled from Chrome several months ago to Safari for the very same reasons. It's far worse in my opinion. I think the reason being is that Google is essentially trying to build out an OS within a WebBrowser. It's almost like your running an OS inside an OS when using Chrome. I switched back to Safari as my primary browser, hoping it would provide a more native OSX experience, and use less computing resources.

Well, I've found recently that Chrome seems to function longer before blowing up with memory. Safari, since upgrading to 5.1.9 (actually from 5.1.7), has been a NIGHTMARE! It shoots up to 3 or 4GBs, then it will either refresh every open window, or I have to manually force quit the webkit, to do the same thing. It slows to a crawl, mouse clicks won't do anything, and worse, if I close it and reopen it, there is no guarantee all my previous windows will be able to re-open. I think it's because when the WebKit restarts it only opens ONE TAB per WINDOW, thus the others only have the title of the page on the tab, so when it re-opens, it can't find the url!! This totally *****, as I have a number of windows & tabs open at any time. I find I must manually OPEN EVER TAB once the WebKit restarts itself, which also means the memory use goes right back up! You'd think with a closed system, Apple could make a browser that just works..... but this is awful, I may even go back to 5.0.5, cause that worked much better...

I had this same problem with one of my Macs. Safari Web Content just kept increasing its RAM usage until everything else was paged out and the machine was unresponsive.

I fixed it. I closed all Safari windows. Then I went to the Window menu and noticed that Safari was still indicating a window was open, even though none was visible. I pressed Command-W. Checked the Window menu again, another "phantom" window was there (these were all sites I'd previously visited).

I kept closing these phantom, invisible windows until there were no more. Re-launched Safari. Fixed.

I have no idea how that happened. FWIW, this machine does not have multiple monitors and the windows were not visible in the "all app windows" when Exposé/Mission Control was triggered.

HTH.

Rob, I'm not clear as to what you did. When you said you closed all Safari windows, did you do that manually, closing them one at a time, or just closed Safari? I'm going to have to try that, it's pretty odd there'd be "phantom windows"..... Well, on second thought, no it wouldn't be that odd. 😉

Sorry, I should have been clearer. The windows are invisible, but their titles appear in the Window menu. You can "close" them by pressing Command-W or selecting "close window" from the File menu. You have to close them one at a time by repeating this procedure until no more "windows" appear in the Window menu. Closing Safari itself doesn't do anything.