Safari 9 is so slow. Need suggestions how to speed it up.

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Safari 9 is so slow. Need suggestions how to speed it up.

Now running El Capitan with this new and supposedly awesome Safari, but good grief, Safari is sooooo slooooowww. I have apple.com as the home page, and that loads at an okay speed. Try to go to google.com and it just hangs -- the progress bar just gets stuck at maybe 1/8 of the way.

If I go to yahoo.com or bing.com, surprisingly those sites load quickly. Perhaps Apple is purposely making Safari access google.com load slowly since it's Google. I don't know.

So I launch Chrome and do the same -- google.com -- and it loads quickly. I go to yahoo.com and bing.com and even apple.com using Chrome and no issues.

The funny thing is, I am using Chrome right now to go to this Apple Support page because I got tired of Safari loading painfully this very Apple Support page. Safari is even slowly accessing Apple's own page.

I really would like to use Safari again but I can't seem to figure out how to rid it of whatever is ailing it. The "Reset Safari" is gone with Safari 9. I had to go to the "Go" command to dump the cache because clearing the cache from the menu items is gone as well.

Thank goodness for Chrome, I can still enjoy browsing the web on my MacBook Pro, which has the Core i7 chip so I don't think it's that that's causing this slowness.

Someone please help. Thank you.

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11)

Posted on Oct 3, 2015 6:04 PM

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Answer 1

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Carolyn Samit

Level 10

165,615 points

Oct 3, 2015 10:30 PM in response to rerunvp

From your Safari menu bar click Safari > Preferences then select the Privacy tab then click: Remove All Website Data

Quit then relaunch Safari to test.

If that didn't speed things up, go back to Safari > Preferences. The time select the Advanced tab then select: Show Develop menu in menu bar

Now you should see Develop between Bookmarks and Window in the menu bar.

Click Develop > Empty Caches

Quit and relaunch Safari and test again.

If that didn't help, you may have a Safari extension or third party plug-in installed that's not compatible with Safari 9 that's slowing Safari down.

From the Safari menu bar click Safari > Preferences then select the Extensions tab. Turn that OFF, quit and relaunch Safari to test.

If that helped, turn one extension on then quit and relaunch Safari to test until you find the incompatible extension then click uninstall.

If it's not an extensions issue, try troubleshooting third party plug-ins.

Back to Safari > Preferences. This time select the Security tab. Deselect: Allow all other plug-ins. Quit and relaunch Safari to test.

If that made a difference, instructions for troubleshooting plugins here.

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Answer 2

rerunvp Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 4, 2015 8:14 AM in response to Carolyn Samit

Carolyn,

Thank you. Your suggested steps helped a great deal, especially going to google.com. However, again, going to this discussion board, I had to resort to using Chrome as Safari is comfortably stuck about 1/4 of the way this time. I am finding Safari more and more frustrating to use both on my Macs and iOS devices that I resorted to using third-party web browsers. I am slowly becoming not a fan, and I am not really sure what do with Safari these days anymore. It is definitely inferior to Chrome, Firefox, and Puffin (for iOS). But thank you so much!

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Answer 3

Nov 27, 2015 10:06 AM in response to rerunvp

Same here. Wanted to get away from Chrome due to how bad it is apparently for power on Macbooks, to see if that was what was draining my brand spanking new Macbook's battery overnight to less than 50% (whole other thread on that one...) but same inexplicable problems. Going to try switching back to firefox. Might be some plugin, but I have all the same plugins in other browsers with no issues and also Safari doesn't even have a plugin available for https everywhere either.

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Answer 4

Jan 23, 2016 3:57 PM in response to rerunvp

I have had a regular problem with Safari crashing with the spinning wheel of death. Despite removing website data, clearing the cache, removing extensions, deleting caches in my library folder, etc... I still find Safari painful to use, its just no longer reliable as a browser anymore. I think the amount of crash reports I've sent to Apple should be an indicator to them that there is a problem. I thought maybe just one machine was suffering but the same problem exists on my iMac at work as well as my MacBook Pro. Both are well spec'd. Come on Apple its time to put some resources back into making this a good browser!

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Answer 5

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Jan 24, 2016 6:57 AM in response to Community User

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

Or you can use your Apple ID to register with this site and go the Apple BugReporter. Supposedly you will get an answer if you submit feedback.

Feedback via Apple Developer

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