News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

February 28, 2007

software

Safari is like a hungry, CPU-eating, memory-devouring monster

Posted Feb. 28, ’07, 9:39 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Software

Safari MonsterSafari, for better or worse, is still my browser of choice. I’ve fiddled with Camino and Firefox, and I keep them around for backup, but something about Safari just feels like home. Still, that doesn’t mean I don’t have my complaints.

Some users have complained loudly about Safari eating up a ton of CPU cycles, especially with multiple tabs open. WebKit developer Dave Hyatt responded on the Surfin’ Safari blog with a detailed explanation of several reasons why that might be, everything from Animated GIFs to Plugins to Marquee elements. That’s right: marquee elements. Man, I’d hoped those had died out last century.

While it’s nice to know that some of these issues have been resolved in the nightly builds, Hyatt makes no mention of what, in my experience, is a far bigger problem: WebKit leaks memory like a sieve. If I have NetNewsWire and Safari open, each with a bunch of tabs, my MacBook and its piddling 1GB of RAM slows to a crawl. I have to quit and relaunch Safari every few days, just to get my computer going again. Please, for the love of Mike, look into that one.

If I’m having so much trouble, why don’t I just switch? Because it hurts so good.

[via Infinite Loop]


11 Comments

42 said:

switching does hurt, which is why I haven't switched to something else despite Safari's prodigious appetite for memory. fix that damn leak already, or whatever it is, but so far firefox and Camino haven't really given me any compelling reasons to use them over Safari, except for the odd site or two where Safari just sits there dumbly going "durrr... whaa?"

Flash makes Safari and Firefox snort CPU cycles like Wall Street dicks on a coke binge. I wonder if these tests accounted for it...

February 28, 2007 9:53 AM
Joseph Compton said:

In Safari preferences, set RSS Reader to NetNewsWire, or whatever you use, and set check for updates to never. It is the rss function in safari that really slows it down.

February 28, 2007 9:57 AM
Moe said:

I have to agree with you. I want to love Safari, but I am merely infatuated with it. My browser of choice is Camino. Oh, so fast. I do miss the RSS feeds from Safari though. I'm hoping Camino adds this functionality (crosses fingers).

February 28, 2007 10:48 AM
Thomas GvL Author Profile Page said:

I totally agree, the memory leaks are hell. I recently switched to Camino because of them. It would monopolize mora than half my RAM sometimes...

February 28, 2007 11:04 AM
Bob S said:

Ah, so that explains it. I've been having the same experience, without the computer savvy to understand- but I happened on the same solutions. This seems to be a rather new phenomenon- only a problem for me for less than 6 months, I think. Why now?

February 28, 2007 11:14 AM
Ludger Heide said:

"I have to quit and relaunch Safari every few days, just to get my computer going again." Thonk about Windows. Quit and relaunch every - well - hpur or so. We're still far better.

February 28, 2007 12:25 PM
Walt Basil said:

Dan, I figured out your problem. In fact, you touched on it yourself when you said "I have to quit and relaunch Safari every few days, just to get my computer going again."

I suggest doing it daily,or just as needed. I know, we love to brag about our uptime which tells us how long it has been since our last update, and we like to leave our applications up and running for just as long. Sometimes we forget about them. Try keeping IE open for a day without having to restart. I always close out my programs and log out at the end of the night. Then close the screen to put it to sleep. Next day is a fresh start without compromising my uptime. ;-)

February 28, 2007 12:33 PM
Jeremy McCullough said:

Just a question to people here...what's the most lightweight full-featured browser out there?

I'm trying to cut down on system resource utilization, as I've only got the stock 512mb in my MacBook. Firefox is awful (and it crashes regularly), and Safari doesn't seem like it's going to work either.

Any suggestions?

February 28, 2007 2:23 PM
nicleT said:
I suggest doing it daily,or just as needed...

I'm sorry but even with this use, Safari remains slow and slows other process.

I tried the RSS trick but it didn't helped for the Bookmarks menu and arrow keys beach-ball problems.

Just a question to people here...what's the most lightweight full-featured browser out there?

I never saw a faster Browser than Camino 0.6.0 in my life I assure you! Not Camino 1.0 but 0.6.0. This said, I dunno how it'll rocks on a Macbook under Rosetta?

February 28, 2007 3:53 PM
miyamotofreak said:

To Jeremy-
Yesterday I decided to switch to Camino. And I couldn't be any happier. It barely touches your resources and is by far the fastest. Make sure to get the 1.1 beta and check pimpmycamino.com for add-ons.

February 28, 2007 4:53 PM
Kelmon said:

Ah, Camino... It's difficult to say where I stand on this when compared to Safari but let's just say that, while Camino is definitely improving, there are some aspects of how it behaves that drives me nuts. One of my primary gripes, it's non-handling of RSS feeds, has finally been fixed but I'm still missing the wonderful automated form-filling that Safari does and copy/paste still doesn't work in Flash applications. This said I do love the speed and the way that I can type an address in the URL bar and the browser won't insist on completing the address for me like Safari does - Camino gives me the choice instead.

As far as I am concerned there is no perfect browser for the Mac yet and it'll be interesting to see which of Safari and Camino gets to that status first. At the moment, however, the Firefox-based browsers can take a hike and I'm still not sure whether Shiira will ever actually deliver anything since development seems to be so slow.

March 1, 2007 12:28 AM

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