Be Excellent To Each Other

This was driving me crazy. A week or so after updating my MacBook to Lion, Safari suddenly starting running like an absolute dog turd. So I've been using Chrome ever since, but I really prefer Safari, and the new Lion features are nice.

This evening I finally got round to doing some cunning Googling on the matter ("mac lion safari slow") and lo and behold, the very first result provides what so far appears to be a complete fix.

If you have the same problem, don't follow the instructions there, however, since they are actually slightly more complicated than necessary. Here is the better fix:

1. Quit Safari if it is running.
2. Activate Finder.
3. Go to the "Go" menu.
4. Hold option key. "Library" will appear. Select it.
5. Navigate to Caches/com.apple.Safari.
6. Delete the "Cache.db" file.

That should do it. Selecting "Empty Cache..." menu in Safari will not suffice, you have to follow the above instructions.

Thanks for the tip. Makes a slight improvement in speed, which is no bad thing.

(S. Jobs has just resigned as Apple CEO, incidentally.)

For me it was quite a lot more than that. My Safari basically spent half the time just displaying the "Beach Ball", doing absolutely nothing for half a minute at a time. Now it's good as new.

Lion safaris? You people sicken me.

Maybe it was on summer holiday.

If your videos (Youtube, etc) are stuttering or pausing, go to Adobe and download Flash again, which fixed that problem in Lion for me.

great tip, was about time safari's summer holiday ended

Safari's a massive memory hog and now even does the iOS thing of ditching pages and reloading them when you activate tabs. However, my way of getting things to speed up has been to remove Flash (and just use Chrome when I need to watch a video or check my blog's stats) and do the Quit > Restart > Reopen All Windows From Last Session dance. Seems to work and deal with RAM issues. Here's hoping one day the Mac gets a really decent browser (although I'm not holding my breath).

I don't get why people do this. FlashBlock or ClickToFlash is massively more convenient when you want to use Flash.

Because ClickToFlash still caused all kinds of problems on my Macs. Safari sped up considerably when Flash was yanked from the system, which also impacted other apps I use, such as Reeder.

Bah, it appears to be a temporary solution, i.e. it has to be redone every couple of days. It has to be some sort of bug, so let's hope it gets sorted. I have now uninstalled flash to see if that will help.

Does Chrome not go faster than Safari anyway?

Technically, it's faster, as is Firefox, but the speeds aren't such that most people would notice. In general use, I always find that whatever browser isn't loaded down with crud is fastest: i.e. the one you've just installed is faster than the one you've used for months.

I find Chrome to be absolutely fine on a Mac. I know it was sketchy at first, but I don't notice any differences between it and the Windows version now.