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OS X Operating Systems Businesses Apple

Using Safari Slows Your System? 242

Posted by kdawson from the need-for-speed dept.
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.
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Using Safari Slows Your System? More

Using Safari Slows Your System?

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  • OMG (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cowscows ( 103644 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @09:54AM (#18193980) Journal
    Hey wow, a piece of software isn't perfect, and the developers are trying to fix it. This is an exciting new paradigm for programming. Thanks for keeping me updated!

    • it's the memory stupid (Score:5, Informative)

      by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:23AM (#18194352)
      I'v already tested this on my computer. here's the facts. 1) at idle on normal web pages safari consumes much LESS cpu time than other browsers 2) if you run a cpu intensive script background it is not slowed by safari in any measurable way.

      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.

      • Re:it's the memory stupid (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MojoRilla ( 591502 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @11:03AM (#18194852)

        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.
        Really? You know, this isn't 1997 when OS's did cooperative multitasking and machines had 32 megs of RAM. In 2007, many people have dual core machines and 1 gig or more RAM, and like to run more than one program at the same time. In this day and age, people want and expect to be able to run multiple apps (including web browsers, instant messaging programs, office apps, and, gasp!, photo editing apps) at the same time.

        • Re:it's the memory stupid (Score:4, Informative)

          by bberens ( 965711 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @11:52AM (#18195548)
          In my experience Photoshop will chew through my 1GB of RAM quite easily. It does have a pretty advanced disk caching mechanism so usually it will perform about the same with less memory, but still. Like running a database it will consume as much memory as you let it for maximum performance.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
          Sure! But in 1997 people weren't editing hundred megabyte images either. I've actually found Photoshop, Safari, Mail, Adium and iCal, a few terminals and XCode work pretty well in that situation. If I'm going to open a dozen of those images before sending them to the printer though, it's best to quit a few apps first.
      • BTW - I noticed this problem awhile back (after some update or other)... but when I got the updates that were pushed down with the Daylight Savings Time patch, the problem stopped. Ergo, a little patch was applied :-D Just a little FYI.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by SporkLand ( 225979 )
        I've never seen a weird mistype like footprint -> offtprint. Are you typing like 2 hoojillion words a minute and those are the sort of strange errors that occur?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
        Safari seems to have a pretty vicious memory leak... particularly when playing flash. The solution is fairly simple though, just quit the app and restart it. It's just when I forget for a week and I discover it using a gig and a half of real memory and everything else crawling along that it's a problem. It would be nice if they'd fix it though.
      • at idle on normal web pages safari consumes much LESS cpu time than other browsers...Safari is using more memory and doing so in a demanding way.

        So it's a simple speed-for-memory tradeoff. The same sort of thing programmers have been making since the dawn of computing.

      • Which other browsers and which versions of said browsers? I don't know about everyone else, but I like my statistics fully qualified (just like I like my domain names).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wingsy ( 761354 )
        I've been to pricegrabber many times and never noticed anything strange. In fact I went there just now and searched for cameras, then browsed through a few. No change in CPU activity. (10.4.8)
    • You must be a Windows user.

  • my test case (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @09:55AM (#18193986)
    I have a 5-1/2 year old iBook. Running anything slows my system down... : p

  • Bloomin' OS X copycats (Score:4, Funny)

    by tttonyyy ( 726776 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @09:58AM (#18194028) Homepage Journal
    Don't you realise Windows has this technology already - it's been slowing down unrelated programs for years! (Sorry, I know it's cheap, but I couldn't resist!)

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Don't you realise Windows has this technology already - it's been slowing down unrelated programs for years! (Sorry, I know it's cheap, but I couldn't resist!)


      No, Apple has had this technology for years and Microsoft just copied it, as usual.

  • Weird... (Score:5, Informative)

    by avalys ( 221114 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:00AM (#18194050)
    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...

    • Re:Weird... (Score:4, Informative)

      by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:19AM (#18194312)
      Safari has a memory leak. run safari for several days. Then close all but the last tab. Safari is use several hundred megs of ram. now I simply close safari when i am done browsing or when i am about a launch a memory intensive app. The new app kicks out all of safari's crud and it launches instantly.

      Firefox is the same speed no matter what, but it too has an occasional memory leak when you open and close lots of tabs.

      • You keep using this word, leak. I do not think it means what you think it means. :-)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
          I've got Safari's cache turned off. I've noticed that memory usage explodes when playing large flash animations and then doesn't come down again when they're closed. If you re-open the animation it takes just as long to load.

          The GP is correct, Safari has a memory leak.
          • Not necessarily. Safari doesn't render the flash, the Macromedia flash player does. Have you tried the same experiment in Firefox? Or perhaps Opera? You might get the same result. (In which case Apple should start nagging Adobe to fix their app...)
      • It's not a leak; it's cache. Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Brandybuck ( 704397 )
          Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

          While that's a nice little bundle of syllables, it isn't true. RAM isn't like cellphone minutes. Here's some more nice sounding syllable collections (with editorial commentary), but they aren't true either:

          Unused harddrive space is wasted harddrive space, so start ripping!

          Unused bandwidth is wasted bandwidth, so make sure you're constantly downloading.

          Unused car seats are wasted car seats, so never drive a sedan without four passengers!

          Unused sleeping pills are wasted sleeping pills

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by JavaLord ( 680960 )
      I have had the same experence. Granted this is anecdotal evidence, but Safari runs much quicker than Firefox on my mac.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by moosesocks ( 264553 )
      Hmm. I've had the same experience actually.

      Give Camino [caminobrowser.org] a try. It's a nice mix between Firefox and Safari.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
      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...

      Same experience on Windows. I have lots of RAM, so let's say I don't care it wants to eat 100-200 MB ram for a few tabs. But I can't help the CPU problem. Not only it slows everything down terribly when loading pages (I frequently launch task manager to see what process eats my CPU a

  • Known Annoyance (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:01AM (#18194068)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by freedumb2000 ( 966222 )
      It's really shame that the Macbook/Pros are limited to 2GB of RAM. More RAM has always been the best way to keep old systems usable over the years. At least the new ones accept a total of 3GB now.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by benwb ( 96829 )
      I was blown away by this as well. I have a 12 inch powerbook about 2 years old with 512MB and never really had major memory issues with running iphoto, safari, and mythfrontend. I got a new mac mini a couple weeks ago with 1GB and noticed paging- mythfrontend took about a minute to start. I bumped up to 2GB and performance improved by an order of magnitude.

  • Running Nighlty code (Score:4, Interesting)

    by failedlogic ( 627314 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:04AM (#18194120)
    Just wondering what other's experiences have been running the nightly code. I've been doing it with Firefox (and when it was Firebird for 2 years). But I've not tried with WebKit. Is it fairly stable, better rending of pages and faster?

    There are a few sites that are noticeably slower on Safari. Its one of the only reasons I'm using Firefox. That and there are a few plug-ins that are better than Saaft and company.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ArsonSmith ( 13997 )
      I have found Safari to be almost completely unusable. Sites like http://kbb.com/ [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/ [az501st.com] most of the menu's don't work.

      • Re:Running Nighlty code (Score:5, Informative)

        by Serious Callers Only ( 1022605 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @11:15AM (#18195010)

        I have found Safari to be almost completely unusable.


        http://kbb.com/ [kbb.com] - Failed validation, 67 errors
        http://www.az501st.com/ [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.
        • You know, when it works fine in both IE and Firefox, why can't Safari handle bad code as well? The quality of, especially, a browser should not be judged strictly on the support of standards, but also and probably more important is it's ability to gracefully handle non-conforming code. Although the purists will say fix the website, there are many many websites that are done by amitures who may not be able to or know how to fix it. Saying they should fix their website, when it works fine in other, more po

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
            Safari works fine on minor non-compliant things, the mistakes amateurs or Dreamweaver make. Where it doesn't work is on the highly complex javascript IE bug exploiting look-how-smart-I-am-isn't-this-cool-and-not-at-all -irritating web pages. Those people should know how to fix it. Actually, they should know how to not do such stupid stuff in the first place.

            It's gotten much better lately, probably because of the rise of Firefox and the cleanup of IE.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Graff ( 532189 )
            The problem is not just bad code. What is happening is they are coding specifically to bugs in IE. IE has a number of quirks that web developers code around. Once the site works in IE they declare the site done and don't bother to check how it works in other browsers. Firefox has a quirks mode where it basically emulates IE's quirks so it mostly works. Also, a lot of developers check for Firefox compatibility because it is the second most-used browser out there. Even with this there are still a lot of

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by jZnat ( 793348 ) *
            Well, if the web browsers handled errors the way they're supposed to (ignore them in some cases, completely fail in other cases like malformed XHTML), people wouldn't be able to get away with errors. Since SGML was so lenient in the first place, we've had the problem where we have an XML standard that lots of people use but hardly anyone uses according to the standards (a big no-no when it comes to pretty much any other XML standard or standard in general).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Snover ( 469130 )
            How is it elitist snobbery? You're asking the browser to handle invalid data for which the only true method for handling it is to bail out, since it's by definition impossible to parse it for proper meaning (it can only be guessed at, and just like dealing with vagueness in human languages, different software can have a different opinion about how the vagueness should be handled). XML parsers do exactly that, which is why I wish more people would start writing sites using XHTML (with the application/xhtml+x
    • I run Webkit exclusively these days. There's no web browser on any platform that's faster or has a better rendering engine.

      Some nightlies will have crash or freeze ("beachball") bugs, but the one I'm currently using is rock-stable. Hasn't crashed yet, and I've had it running constantly for 2-3 weeks. The last time I did have a buggy version of Webkit, I just logged onto the #webkit IRC channel and one of the developers suggested a different build (which was just the ticket).

  • I've noticed that Safari takes a lot of CPU on my system. It happens after I have used a specific java-based web app.

    I suppose it could be Safari's fault or Java's fault, but I would sooner suspect an issue with a stale clientserver connection or something else within the Java app.
    • I frequently disable plugins and java in Safari to reduce the cpu consumption of the process by managing these. None of my own websites require this stuff, nor any of my internal corporate websites. If I am watching strong bad, or doing something else, sure, i may need to re-enable them but in reality, I don't need those plugins and the cpu suck that goes along with doing that animation or even the bw suck of downloading those files. I suspect that most people don't need them for regular web surfing. On
  • I know on my core duo laptop running XP, both firefox and IE tend to bog my system down on pages that have flash animations (using 100% of a single core for 50% overall). How is this news on a techie site that running something in the background may have an impact on other processes? Do we want to go back to the OS 8 days when programs could steal all the processor? I thought SMP was a good thing?

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Paulrothrock ( 685079 )

      Not only that, but the number of plugins available for Firefox make it really worth it. Adblock and Greasemonkey and Web Developer and Firebug give me functionality that's simply not available with Safari or WebKit.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by greed ( 112493 )

        All that Firefox lacks is password storage in the keychain and bookmark sync across multiple machines.

        Between the two, it doesn't matter where I am, Safari has the same stuff in it.

        Which is handy 'cause my stupid G4 iBook has a thermal fault somewhere around the NVRAM and I really should call the repair centre and see how they're getting along.

        It's not like the G3 iBook had 6 bad main logic boards put in it....

        (And yet I still can't stand to use Windows as a primary OS. Maybe I'll get one of those

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xugumad ( 39311 )
      > Safari incorrectly renders lots of sites. Firefox seems to be better about most sites.

      Are you sure that's Safari's fault, and not the site's fault? I've seen a lot more mangled websites than browser bugs (yes, even counting IE)...
  • Dave Hyatt actually makes it clear that safari doesn't slow the machine as much as speed up javascript / flash...

  • I concur (Score:3, Informative)

    by rattler14 ( 459782 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:11AM (#18194190)
    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.

    • Re:I concur (Score:4, Funny)

      by loafing_oaf ( 1054200 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:19AM (#18194302)

      Just switch to Firefox. I'm using it right now on Windows XP, and I haven't noticed any problems with memory le*$@!!- NO CARRIER

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Just switch to Firefox. I'm using it right now on Windows XP, and I haven't noticed any problems with memory le*$@!!- NO CARRIER


        Firefox on OS X is nice. Except it doesn't support middle-click for opening/closing new tabs, for whatever reason. Which is kinda stupid if you use multibutton mice (yes, they work) on OS X. For single button usage, CMD-Click works, but it's a poor substitute since CMD-Click on a tab doesn't close it like middle click does.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StressedEd ( 308123 )
      ...is that the process "kernal task" keeps eating up...

      Can anyone give a concise explanation of what "kernel_task" actually is? I have seen some broad chatter and an overview [bleepsoft.com], but nothing significant. I too notice it going banannas from time to time. Then again I use MATLAB and various other memory eaters quite a lot...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bastian ( 66383 )
        That overview you linked is full of a lot of distracting chatter.

        The short and simple answer is: Kernel_task is the kernel.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Guy Harris ( 3803 )

          The short and simple answer is: Kernel_task is the kernel.

          And a more correct answer is "kernel_task is the Mach task to which all kernel threads belong".

          Each user-mode process has a Mach task corresponding to it; each pthread in that task has a Mach thread corresponding to it. Those threads can be executing kernel code if they're in the middle of a system call, so not everything done by the kernel is done in a kernel_task thread.

          The kernel has threads of its own, not started within a user-mode process's

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by _|()|\| ( 159991 )

      Memory is a real problem on OS X, especially with Apple programs. After Safari and Mail have been open for a while (say, a day or two), they get sluggish. Measuring memory is tricky, but Safari is almost always one of the first two or three processes in top sorted by rsize or vsize. (Is it bad if vsize for a single application exceeds the total RAM?)

      I suspect that some programs have been conservative in their use of autorelease pools, causing garbage to lie around longer than necessary. I ran across t [mikeash.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
        I agree about Safari (and Aperture, but there's a reason for it), but the others you mention aren't fair. Mail has been running for a month without being restarted on my machine, going through about a thousand spam a day, and it's using 56MB. The vsize is immaterial -- it ISN'T virtual memory as in, memory swapped to disk. I think the sum of my vsizes exceeds the hard disk space in this machine.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 )

      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

      They must be using code from Firefox...

      (ducks)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
      The "virtual memory" column in Activity Monitor isn't disk virtual memory. Which is good, because I think right now it's larger than my hard drive. I think it's some sort of maximum the process is allowed to have (which grows when the process needs more anyway). The Real memory column is the actual amount of memory the process is using, and kernel_task is pretty good about keeping it reasonable. Right now my MPB has been running for a month and kernel_task is using about 167 MB, which is about where it
    • 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.

      In general, I find 10.4 to be a minor annoyance. I consider it growing pains. 10.4 added TONS of new stuff, but this new stuff is, well, ne
  • Going on Safari is supposed to be a chill out vacation isn't it. And because nature is so balanced, life speeds up for all the wildlife who have to run like fuck when they see you approach with your high powered rifle.
  • 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.

    I use Safari because I want that whole "Apple" experience, and I also like the bookmark manager. But there have been a few times when web pages didn't work quite correctly in Safari, so I had to run Firefox anyway.

    I've been thinking about formally switching to Firefox, seems like it would be less trouble, but I'd hate to have to do that somehow.

    boxlight
    • As someone who has switched to Firefox from Safari, Im not sure I would recommend it if you are going for the mac experience. One of the recent changes that happened (in the new security patch) was they changed the key-bindings and made the app act even less mac-like (cmd-w only closes a tab and won't close the window when you close the last tab, instead it opens a blank tab and you must press cmd-shift-w to close the window). That and it doesn't handle dual-monitors well at all (everything but the main men

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altus ( 1034 )

        While I agree that this is less mac like behavior I prefer it. I like to think of tabs as windows. I guess if you use individual windows to group together similar tabs and that is part of your web browsing habits that might be different.

        I often found myself closing tabs I didn't want to close in safari. It doesn't happen as often in firefox.

        Still, not very mac like I will freely admit.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "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/ [charlessoft.com]

      before doing that you might also try removing Safari's preference file: com.apple.Safari.plist

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by KH ( 28388 )
      One sure way I know to crash Safari is to hit the Back button after posting to /.. Did it happen to you after posting?

      Another /. Safari offender is the Intel flash ad with those cheetahs (I see a German version, presumably because I'm in Germany. Do other people see something else?). It consumes 100% of my precious CPU cycles, and slows the system down, a lot.

      I'll just have to make sure not to hit the back button after posting this.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by chochos ( 700687 )
        Well now at least I know it's not just me. I hate that! Sometimes I hit the back button and right after that I hit my forehead for forgetting that /. will crash Safari. Something to do with the new discussion system, I guess.
    • What about Camino [caminobrowser.org]? I've been using it for months and it seems like the best of both worlds between Safari and Firefox. I haven't had the render and speed issues I've had with Safari, and its interface is much closer to the rest of Mac OS. It seems very stable for such an early revision.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NickFitz ( 5849 )

      Forum advice was to run "repair permissions", I did but it didn't help.

      It didn't help because the people who gave you that advice are imbeciles who believe in voodoo. [daringfireball.net] It was able to help with occasional problems caused by Classic and bad installers circa OS X 10.1, but there are hardly any circumstances where it will make any difference to anything on more recent versions, as explained here. [unsanity.org]

  • But I wonder (Score:3, Funny)

    by raynet11 ( 844558 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @10:14AM (#18194242)
    If a train leaves Boston with an I-MAC running Safari doing 40MPH heading west and a 2nd train leaves Chicago doing 60MPH heading East with an mini MAC running Safari and Quake 4. How many I-PODS will be sold funding more "Hi I'm a MAC" comercials before: a. My Karma can be kicked down another notch b. The code will be fixed ? c. This post will be changed to flame bait d. This post is silly and you can't believe your still reading it?
  • I have that one on a laminated pocket card they issued me the first day of Programming School.
  • The S60 webkit [nokia.com] 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.
  • Using safari slows down any system:
    1) You use Safari
    2) You state Safari slows down your system
    3) You post it
    3) Gets posted in Slashdot
    4) You get slashdotted
    5) The holding system slows down
    The funny thing is that Safari may slow down other system than yours as well.
  • Since they use the webkit as well.
    • I've found that dashboard slows down my system far more than Safari. The more widgets added the more memory and CPU usage (drastically). It's almost as if each widget gets its own instance of a web browser (excuse my ignorance for I know nothing of how dashboard is implemented).

  • wasn't the slowdown natural?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by towsonu2003 ( 928663 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @11:09AM (#18194920)
    I've been using Firefox in Linux so long, I got used to Firefox slowing down every inch of my laptop when I go to sites that use transparent PNGs or javascript (digg and sourceforge are a major slow-downers for instance - I don't go there anymore... and I can't comfortably use slashdot's new commenting system)*

    So when I read this item, I told myself "oh, so... what I'm experiencing isn't normal. it can be news in slashdot... wow." Firefox has different effects on different people I guess...


    * Using a clean profile + a nightly build doesn't help. Submitted bug reports do not get any interest from devels except tagging it with "perf" (I know, they're busy, but look - it's news on slashdot when it's Safari on Mac).


    bugs in question? so far, I was lazy enough to file just these: 366728; 368365; 368908; 369044; 369682; 370697


    pls don't reply w/ "worksforme". I spent considerable time trying to not reproduce the slow down effects, as you might guess...

  • To my mind, a more important measure of speed is how a browser affects the overall speed of your system.

    Well that may be to your mind. To my mind, that's nothing more than your entire rational for writing this article. For most people, when they're browsing they're not doing anything else at the time except perhaps checking for e-mail, so that the performance hit on any other applications is non-consequential.

  • <p>From the article:</p>

    <quote>
    The only thing different was that I had been surfing the web a bit while the render was going on that day, where the day before I had not. "Surely surfing the web on a mulit-processor machine shouldn't add 15 minutes to a render", I thought. Well, yes it does actually, if you're using Safari.
    </quote>

    <p>Put another way: "Surely letting the computer ONLY do my render won't be any faster than letting the computer render AND surf the web". Surely yo
  • Safari slows down other programs so that it can look faster in comparison. So that's the secret of their success!
  • I'm reading people complain about 200 mb memory leaks. My Safari usually eats up 800, 900 megabytes of RAM even after just starting up. I'm running SALR but still.

    Is it normal that at startup my powerbook has over a gig of virtual memory?

  • Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_kress ( 99356 ) on Thursday March 01, 2007 @12:58PM (#18196438)
    I'm not an apple fanboy yet, but I'm really impressed with the immediate response of the Safari development team. Imagine if IE was slowing down some other program--the last group you'd expect to hear from would be the IE dev team--so far outside the realm of possibility as to be laughable.

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