Safari becomes intermittendly unusable

"it always shows during those times that Safari is "Using significant energy."

You may have a Safari extension or third party plug-in installed that's causing the hard drive to spin up.

It's easy to troubleshoot.

From the Safari menu bar click Safari > Preferences then select the Extensions tab. If there are any extensions installed, uninstall one at a time then quit and relaunch Safari to test.

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 plug-ins. Quit and relaunch Safari to test.

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

wiggle-britches wrote:

I use Safari as my default web browser. Once, twice, or even 3 times a day (there is no pattern as to frequency, timing, length, or place), the browser quits pulling up webpages. During those times, the computer sounds like (for lack of better description) the hard drive is spinning up. I know it can't be that because the internal memory is a flash drive. Also, it always shows during those times that Safari is "Using significant energy". The way the webpages stop loading, it appears the internet connection is simply becoming slow. But every time, I can start up Chrome, and the while Safari is hosed up, Chrome is doing just fine. So I assume it's not the connection. Eventually the problem goes away, and the process repeats some time again and again and again.

Check your top sites as they do refresh - and Spotlight/Finder may be getting behind on indexing web data - So you may want to look at spotlight preferences in you system preferences.

Go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced then deselect: Stop plug-ins to save power

Quit then relaunch Safari to test.