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Using Safari Slows Your System?
sandoz writes "Macenstein has up an interesting article with some evidence that running Safari seems to slow down unrelated programs. While the speed with which a browser renders a Web page is an important measure, the difference between browsers is usually a matter of a few seconds at most. To my mind, a more important measure of speed is how a browser affects the overall speed of your system." Some responses to the article suggest that memory handling in WebKit may be the culprit. The Safari developers have already responded to this article on the webkit.org blog. They explain why the slowdown might be occurring and how it's (probably) already been fixed in the nightly build. And they request more minimal test cases.
A few months ago, I switched to Firefox because I was convinced Safari was slowing down my system. Just this morning, I fired up Safari again - and it is at least three times as fast as Firefox. Don't know what I was thinking...
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I have both the nightly and the original Safari version installed. The latter leaks ram like crazy which tends to slow things down. You would think they would have fixed this ages ago. But they haven't. Try closing Safari periodically.
Another observation I have is that 1GB of ram is really only marginally adequate on my 2.16Ghz Macbook pro. If you have safari open, iPhoto open, and god forbid, a rosetta app (e.g. Word) open - you're waiting five seconds for windows to come up as disk gets paged out. Unacceptable.
I love safari and gladly use it over any other browser. However, since 10.4.5+, I have noticed that (as a whole) there appears to be an inability of OS X to free RAM up as efficiently as it used to. Programs like Safari, after many hours of usage, will remain as a HUGE RAM/virtual memory sink. I constantly quit Safari to try and alleviate/fix this.
But what seems to happen is that the process "kernal task" keeps eating up more and more ram even after Safari is shut down. After a couple days of usage, I feel the need for a restart just to flush out this annoyance.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, It's only a minor annoyance, but it is definitely noticeable and something I hope is dealt with when 10.5 comes out.
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
i've been a fan of NightShift for downloading the latest safari/webkit nightly builds. it leaves your current install alone, while giving you the ability to test the latest webkit. unfortunately, the current build doesn't like my safari plugins, though i'm not sure which one. pith helmet, saft, or safari stand.
for a minute there, i lost myself...
The S60 webkit is a port of Webkit to the Series 60 3rd edition platform. Nokia has created a memory manager for this port that can make the webkit works with low memory. If only I can have the low memory footprint browser in my Mac.
-- tinyhack.com
in the macenstein article they too noted that cpuintensive tasks like quicktime were not slowed but memory intensive tasks like photoshop were. Also they noted that the in memory and virtual memory footprints were several fold higher for safari than for firefox.
clearly this is a no brainier. Safari is using more memory and doing so in a demanding way. I don't know why but I assume it probably has something to do with how it handles the back-forward cache, fast page compoaition, and images. Maybe there's some memory leak too, since safari's offtprint grows during the day.
But this is utterly unsurprising. If you run a big memory app like photshop you already know better than to be running other apps that consume memory.
The only problem I've had with safari is not this but there are just some webpages that don't seem to comlicated that make it grind to a halt and use 60% of the cpu. One example is pricegrabber.com.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I have found Safari to be almost completely unusable. Sites like http://kbb.com/ wont let you look up certain car values. some web controlled APC power strips we have wont even display the first page, and http://www.az501st.com/ most of the menu's don't work.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
"Since I upgraded to 10.4.8, Safari crashes on me about once a week. Forum advice was to run "repair permissions", I did but it didn't help. "
That seems to be the advice given for everything by some people. I'm not sure why anyone should think it would help in this case or many others.
I suppose you could try reinstalling the application after getting it off the install disc with Pacifist:
http://www.charlessoft.com/
before doing that you might also try removing Safari's preference file: com.apple.Safari.plist from the "Preferences" directory in your Home library, so that a new one is generated, in case there's a corruption in that causing problems. All this, again, is unspecific advice, but at least it's not Voodoo.
You might also like to try the Camino browser. That also uses Mozilla's Gecko engine, but has far better integration with the platform. It also uses a Safari-style bookmark manager:
http://www.caminobrowser.org/
I've yet to find a solution for the keychain password storage, but there's a plugin from Google called Google Browser Sync that I use to keep Firefox on my Powerbook and the mobile Firefox on my flash drive synchronized.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
http://kbb.com/ - Failed validation, 67 errors
http://www.az501st.com/ - Failed validation, 207 errors
You're blaming the wrong people; try complaining to the people who made the broken websites and didn't test or at least validate them.
Camino seems to hold up best on my little ibook. Both Firefox and Safari crash when they hit big blocks of javascript, which are everywhere these days. It also is more Mac-like than Firefox; uses Cocoa for the UI.
Opera for Windows and Mac has been free as in beer for quite some time now. Go download it from Opera.com, it's pretty good.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016