I downloaded and began using the new Safari 4 Beta the day Apple released it. I’ve complained (mostly on Twitter) about various aspects of it, things that I’ve now (more or less) gotten used to: most significantly the still-awkward title bar tabs.
But one thing I haven’t gotten used to is the ridiculous amount of time Safari 4 Beta takes to get up and running, at least for me. The window appears promptly after clicking on the icon, but then I’m visited by the dreaded spinning beach ball of death. This situation endures for at least a minute or two (if anything, I am exaggerating that time down), and then things proceed as normal.
At first I thought maybe it was something peculiar about my own site (even though it loads just fine in other browsers, including Safari 3), which I have set to load as the home page. But I just waited out Safari’s ridiculous start-up time, then went into the preferences and set it to load with a blank page. And it still took just as long, not even loading anything from the Internet. So clearly it’s just something in the internal workings of the app itself.
I have not seen anything anywhere about this issue. Everyone seems to love Safari to death, and says nothing about its speed other than how blazing fast it is. I guess it’s pretty snappy once it gets going, but for me all I can think about is this ridiculous load time at the beginning.
And so, this humble blog post shall serve as a beacon in the darkness, calling out to all those who suffer as I do (oh, such suffering) from an inexcusable lag at the start-up of Safari 4 Beta.
For what it’s worth, I’m running a stock black MacBook purchased just last August (right before Apple retired them, of course), 2 GB of RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.6. In other words, this should not be happening.
Also, for what it’s worth, once Safari has gotten going, my site loads very fast… less than a second on my cable connection. So it’s definitely not something with my site (thankfully, since I can’t imagine what it would have been).
Comments
36 responses to “Why does Safari 4 Beta take SOOOOO LOOOONG to start up? Am I the only one having this problem?”
Yes.
Ahh, well thanks, that helps. :P
I’m wondering if the slowness has something to do with RSS… Safari was just running fine for me, and then I went into the Preferences to see if I could adjust any settings that might shut off whatever is slowing it down. All was well until I hit the RSS tab, then it went back into spinning beach ball mode (and still is now, a couple minutes later — I’m in Firefox writing this).
Drag, man. What’s up with this? It’s not like I have a bunch of shady apps running on here… my system is about as clean as they come.
Starts in less than 2 seconds and I have it load 3 tabs (three web sites). I use NetNewsWire for RSS, instead of Safari, so maybe thats your problem.
You got any Safari add-ons? I had Google Gears installed and none of the Google docs stuff would work. Just suggesting could be an issue. BTW, startup is quick (except first time when previews were being snagged).
No, I don’t have a slowdown. It starts up in just a second or two, and pages load quickly. I DO get beachballs, though, whenever a page with a lot of Flash ads (especially, ads with Flash video players) are present.
Note that I am using RSS in Safari 4 with no slowdown problem from that, either.
No add-ons, and I’m not using anything for RSS on this system, period. (I only check RSS fields with Google Reader in Safari for iPhone.)
I was thinking maybe it had something to do with Flash too, possibly the Flash audio player built into WordPress, but that idea was pretty much negated by the fact that Safari is taking the same time to load even when I have it set to start up loading a blank page.
I’m in Safari right now, and it’s running fine. It’s just that initial start-up that takes forever. I don’t get it.
Yes.
Well, the next step in a scenario like this is always to assume that something might be cluttering up my user account and causing this problem. So I set up a new user account as a test, logged in as that user, and observed no lag in Safari. Then I logged out and back into my main account, and this time, at least, Safari also was not slow on this account. I’ll have to see if this good performance persists though, or if the problem comes back. I had already rebooted once in an attempt to rid myself of the problem, and that didn’t work.
I have 2.2 gHZ Core 2 Duo MBP running 10.5.6. I start with Safari’s cache cleared. WIth 5 seconds of clicking Safari in the dock, Safari is up and macsurfer’s home page is loaded. I’m running off of a 1.5mbps DSL line.
er, the launch-time for safari B4 is not the chokepoint for me –
the restart (after installing) is the show-stopper:
15 minutes & still stalled!
How many fonts do you have loaded in your system?
LOTS of fonts can really slow down application launching.
Nah, I don’t think that’s it. I do have a lot of fonts, but it’s not significantly affecting other apps (you know, ones that actually load all of the fonts, like Pages, OpenOffice, Photoshop). Never affected the old version of Safari. Doesn’t affect Firefox.
Actually, since I did that thing with the second user profile, Safari seems to be loading faster on my main profile too. There’s one particular site I’ve been visiting a lot lately (the RPM Challenge) that seems like it might be involved… not sure if there’s some problem with loading Flash or some other “whiz-bang” feature RPM’s using that is hanging up Safari for some reason. That site was giving me some trouble (just not this severe) with the old version of Safari too.
I changed the RSS reader to Mail in the Safari 4 prefs and that fixed my spinning beach ball problem
Thanks for the tip on the RSS reader. I might try that… although in the time since I posted this, I’ve gotten a new MacBook and frankly I’m scared to update it to Safari 4 Beta!
I am having the same problem. I am on the 1st gen white macbook, 1.83 dual core with 2GB ram. I’ve rolled back to safari 3. My guess is that safari 4 is way too resource intensive for my machine? safari 3 is blazing fast, however, everytime i click something in safari 4, i get the beachball for about 1-2 minutes.
the weird thing is, that when I first installed it, it worked fine.
I’ve been having this problem as well. I removed Inquisitor, reset Safari, checked permissions, verified my disk, ran Onyx, rolled back to Safari 3 and the problem persists. I’m going to try the creating a new user option. I’m glad that others are experiencing this issue and it’s not just me.
If you find you need to back out of Safari 4 beta (as I have — inserting hyperlinks in wordpress’ visual editor doesn’t work for example), then here’s how:
http://www.markwheadon.com/blog/2009/02/how-to-back-out-of-safari-4beta/
Cheers,
Mark
Actually, the problem is that you have Safari 3 Prefrences still on your system. Back them up and remove them from your ~/Library folder and all should be well, as Safari 4 will create new ones for you. After that you can restore your bookmarks.
So the question then is why didn’t the Safari 4 installer remove those files?
It’s irrelevant now anyway; since I wrote this I’ve gotten a new MacBook and I’ve decided not to install Safari 4 on it until the official release is out.
FYI and others coming across this site.. try Safari menu > Reset Safari > leave all ticked > Reset.. (I also removed some plugins) but I think reset was final fix. My guess.. I think my page history previews had exploded and Safari was freezing trying to write to it with multiple tabs loading at the same time. Info for those who haven’t tried this yet
I have a Early 2008 Macbook Pro, 2.4 Ghz, 4 GB RAM and Safari takes so long to start up it’s ridiculous. It even takes longer to load than Firefox. Safari used to be a browser I open up for quick browsing because it opened almost instantly, but not anymore. I know it’s in beta, but I don’t see a reason for it to be so slow.
Safari 4 beta worked fine for me to start with – very fast – but now it seems it’s getting slower and slower.
..and don’t forget it is a BETA
I’ve seen the same thing and I have a MacBook Pro w/ 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM. They better get it squared away before it goes final. I’ve gone to Firefox for now though.
Navi! You are a life saver! I moved the Safari folder out of ~/Library and restarted and I have a much faster boot with Safari 4. Thank you for the excellent (amd obvious) tip!
Thank you Navi! That solution worked perfectly.
After a lot of searching, I found a couple of other symptoms:
/var/log/system.log was showing a problem with “PubSubAgent”, including lines like this:
Jun 1 00:03:33 — PubSubAgent[16241]: *** DATABASE IS BROKEN/STUCK: Moving aside and rebuilding ***
I also noticed Trash filling with loads of folders named “Database nn-nn-nn-nnn” (various numbers). Apparently, each time PubSubAgent crashes, it moves its database to the Trash and tries to rebuild it. I was able to determine that the slow startup of Safari directly correlated to PubSubAgent trying to reach “stability”.
This led me to ~/Library/PubSub, where I found a “Feeds” directory. In it, I found directories containing thousands (!!!) of XML files. Some of these subdirectories had over 7000 files in them!! These XML files appear to be feed summaries.
After SEVERAL minutes waiting on “rm -rf” to clean this “Feeds” directory up, I find Safari is back to normal!
Of course, your mileage may vary, but try cleaning this directory up!
I’ll be watching to see if it fills back up…
Yes, I have the same problem: G4 867 dual processor, 1.5 gb RAM, Verizon DSL, Tiger. Worked fine with Safari 3, takes 30+ seconds to load a page with Safari 4. Have tried all sorts of software repair/maintenance programs, then did archive + install with Tiger. No difference! Amazing!
Delete Safari application and Safari folder from Library. Download Safari 4 from Apple downloads and reinstall. Solved.
Since you can’t open the RSS Feeds tab in Preferences, run this command from terminal(without quotes).
“defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSyndicationEnabled 0”
This will add “DebugSyndicationDisabled” line to the com.apple.Safari.plist, which will disable RSS feeds. This sped up our load time from 2 minutes to 1-2 seconds.
I had this problem too. It was caused by the old Safari 3 folder still being in /library. I dragged it to the trash – problem solved! Are apple aware of this problem I wonder?
Thanks to James: changing my RSS reader to Mail fixed my slow loading problem as well.
Found your site after getting super-frustrated with how slow Safari 4 (RTM, not beta) was on my machine. Everything pointed to RSS, because every interaction with any RSS-related feature (viewing, checking, preferences, startup) was slow. I tried resetting, clearing caches, running Onyx and nothing helped. Then I looked in my /Library/Internet Plug-Ins as well as ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins folder and found a lot of plug-ins that had accumulated over time. Unfortunately, instead of going through them one at a time to find out which was causing the slow-down, I deleted all the ones I did not need or that were easy to re-install. I kept Flash, QuickTime and Java and deleted the rest. That solved it. Safari is now nice and fast again. What a relief. I am expecting to be the culprit among the following plug-ins:
– Silverlight (somewhat unlikely)
– Unity Player
– Flip4Mac WMV
– Hulu Desktop
The rest I cannot remember. Maybe the slow-down was also caused by an interaction among 2 or more of those plug-ins. The symptom turned out to be that almost any interaction with the browser EXCEPT browsing itself caused some sort of feedback/callback from on of the plug-ins that was not handled in a timely manner.
mine does the exact same thing. i’ve even tried resetting the whole computer, a trick apple support told me when my drive wouldn’t burn, turn off the computer, take out the battery and press and hold the power button. after about 10 seconds its supposed to beep. mine used to, but doesn’t anymore. i don’t know what the problem is. my girlfriend has the exact same computer as me, just about two years newer, with no problem. it’s in really good shape, that’s really the only problem. also, safari has a tendency to just quit on me. which irritates me, because i’ve taken to just leaving all of my windows open because it takes so long. one thing that i have found to make it go a little faster (or because of my impatience, it just feels faster) i open the initial window and a new tab. then i open a second window and about three tabs. i close the first window and then open a third. by that time it usually runs. then i close the third. i dunno, seems to work…
oh, also, quick tip. don’t leave your computer plugged in often if the battery is fully charged. i used to do that and then my battery got “over-charged” and now it wont hold a charge at all. seems to happen to a lot of mac batteries, but most people don’t know about it…
Like most people
I also feel frustrated by the slowness of this safari browser…it never loads fast…at all…lately I have been using opera which is reasonably fast but does freeze and crash from time to time…I used kmeleon for a few years but gave up on that because it is also slow and prone to problems…I never use internet explorer because it is worser that safari…well at least in my experience…