Safari on my Mac had recently become intolerably slow. Here’s how I restored it to its former speedy glory…
My Mac has been displaying all manner of weird behaviour over the last few weeks, not entirely unrelated to the fact that it was in serious need of some lovin’ maintenance, as well as the fact that my ailing hard drive is on its way out. That’s for another post soon…
Anyway, Safari particularly had slowed right down, to the point where clicking on a new tab would result in a painful wait for our friend, the spinning beach ball, to finish its colourful twirling. Although I do web development generally using Firefox (entirely so that I can use Joe Hewitt’s awesome Firebug extension) I try where I can to use Safari for browsing. It’s always been far faster, much slicker, and generally more pleasurable to use.
So this was upsetting. After a brief shufty around the web for ideas, here are the solutions I tried. I’m happy to say that my Safari is now whizzing along at the speed of light. Hopefully these tips help someone else too.
Clear unused language files
- Open the Finder (or Pathfinder for the especially enlightened…), browse to the Applications folder, and find the Safari icon.
- Do a right-click (or CTRL-click) and choose ‘Get Info‘.
- Whizz down to the ‘languages‘ dropdown menu at the foot of the Get Info window.
- Uncheck any languages you’re not likely to use.
Clear cached favicons
- Browse to ~/Library/Safari (the ~ being your home folder)
- Trash the icons folder (don’t worry, this will be rebuilt again).
Clear saved auto-fill form entries
- Go to Safari Preferences
- Click the Auto-Fill tab
- Click the edit button next to the Other Forms checkbox
- Hit the Remove All button, and then Done
As always, your mileage may vary, but it’s worked wonders for me.
Anyone got any further tips to provide Safari with go-faster stripes?
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