Safari exceptionally slow with NCBI websites

This is a very specialized issue - I am a biology researcher who uses a Mac for my queries to the data resources at the National Center For Biotechnology Information. Anyone involved in modern biomedical research makes use of this site extensively, whether working at the bench or doing computational biology. Familiar affliiated sites are PubMed for biomedical publications and GenBank for DNA sequence information.

In the past 6+ months I have noticed when using Safari that the response time from the NCBI websites to be extremely slow, even reaching the point where Safari seems to time out and complain it can't find the server. It was making the site almost unusable for me.

Even the home page can be remarkably slow to load - the progress bar starts and then stalls at 25 - 30% (is it thinking?)....

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

The issue seems to be with Safari. In a speed comparison, from the same computer at work (MacBook Pro, OS X10.9, 8 GB Ram), when comparing Safari to Google Chrome, Chrome loads pages rapidly and working on the NCBI sites is quite facile. Safari is miserably slow. Firefox performs similarly to Chrome as well.

This test was run with Safari reset to clear all the caches and cookies, and the Chrome install was fresh with an empty cache. Before the question arises, the was not antiviral software running on the machines to monitor/slow websites.

I raise the discussion because I would like to continue to use Safari as my default browser. And the NCBI site is a huge resource used by many people who also use Mac's.

So if this is some compatibility issue of Safari to this website, I hope that future releases of Safari will address this, to provide as smooth a usage experience as Chrome or Firefox.