[drainyoo]

I found a bunch of tips that greatly speed up Safari. These tips work so well that I thought I would share it with everyone. Maybe some of you already now about these tips but Ill post them anyways. All the following tips are from macosxhints.com.

1. Delete all your autofill entries from time to time. do this by going to Safari preferences, Autofill button, and then click the "Edit..." button for the "Other forms" box. In the next window that appears, just click Remove All.


2. Turn off all the languages you don't need. In the Finder, select the Safari application and do a Get Info (Command-I), click "Languages," and uncheck all the languages you don't need.

3. Disable Javascript in Safari (on the Security panel in the Preferences), it will load pages much faster.

4. Over time, Safari stores more and more info in your user's Library/Safari folder. Even though you can "reset" Safari, this doesn't clean up everything. The offending garbage was the "Icons" folder that stores every favicon you have ever come across. Manually delete this folder, which removed hundreds of files and folders from your machine and Safari. Once trashed, Safari is back to it's old speedy self.

You can also easily purge the unused icons from the cache with the following command from Terminal.app:

find $HOME/Library/Safari/Icons -type f -atime +30 -name "*.cache" -delete

Add this to your crontab to run every night. It purges any cached icons which have not been accessed in the past 30 days.

This seems like best compromise. It keeps the cache small, but still keeps the more useful favicons.

Or

Go to Users -> username -> Library -> Safari.

Go into the Icons folder and delete everything in there. Once you have deleted everything, return to the Safari folder and click on (highlighting) the Icons folder. Get Info and click the triangle next to Ownership & Permissions. Change the Owner to you (your short Unix name) and set the access to "Read only" then set the rest of the access lines to "No access"

This one helped a lot. My Icons folder was 17MBs!

5. If your Safari Bookmarks menu takes a while to pop up (like mine did -- very frustrating), just make sure that the bookmark names are short, as long ones slow it up considerably.

6. Increase Safari's page loading speed. Dave Hyatt made a post on his blog that describes a timer that Safari uses before it starts displaying any content. Supposedly the algorithm will be changed with the next release of Safari, but for now, you can still decrease the timer by quiting Safari and typing

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25

at the Terminal.

[fisherKing]

some good tips (i've had my icons folder empty & locked for some time).
but turning off javascript will cause some problems...
like this very site, where clicking on a forum connects you (without having to hit "go"); javascript!

and yahoo mail won't work without it, some other sites too.

i also use safari enhancer to disable the cache (and hide underlines for links... )


and then slow the whole thing down with pithhelmet (but worth it to kill those ads)

[bmedina]

What does number 2 do to speed up Safari? I thought that only increased the speed of searches in the Finder.

[Sharky K.]

-oeps-

[Maflynn]

I like the auto-fill feature. It saves me time, at most I only have to type a couple of characters.

As for #3, I think your not going to be able to hit a lot of sites with out javascript.

While a few of these are useful, you don't want to turn so much off in the name of speed which then also sacrifies your internet experience.

To be fair, I've never really noticed that Safari to be slow. Perhaps I'm not too obervant on these things. I'll try a couple of these recommendations, perhaps seeing how much stuff is in my icon's folder.

Mike

[gorickey]

7.) Wait for Safari v1.3...

[drainyoo]

I did all of them except turning off Javascript. I use to to frequently but I put it up anyways for others just in case. I didnt come up with the tip, Im just sharing it.

All the others ones great changed the speed of Safari. The Language one was a good one. Now it launches right away.

[drainyoo]

Originally posted by fisherKing:
some good tips (i've had my icons folder empty & locked for some time).
but turning off javascript will cause some problems...
like this very site, where clicking on a forum connects you (without having to hit "go"); javascript!

and yahoo mail won't work without it, some other sites too.

i also use safari enhancer to disable the cache (and hide underlines for links... )


and then slow the whole thing down with pithhelmet (but worth it to kill those ads)

Does Pith Helmut really slow down Safari? I have it running and I was curious.

[fisherKing]

Originally posted by drainyoo:
Does Pith Helmut really slow down Safari? I have it running and I was curious.

it was painful on my pismo, but usable on my 12" revC pb.
it DOES slow things down a bit; your mileage may vary.

but i wouldn't give it up...no flash ads! etc...

[Randman]

The 2.0 beta of Pith also has a plug-in script (just drag it in) that helps block the text ads in gmail.

[nooon]

Originally posted by Randman:
The 2.0 beta of Pith also has a plug-in script (just drag it in) that helps block the text ads in gmail.

so does putting this in your custom css:

Code:
iframe[src*="googlesyndication"], iframe[src^="/google/box?"] {
display: none !important
}

[yukon]

I use multiple browsers because site design seems to suck....iCab has everything turned off and filtered out since it's good at filtering and bad at doing things (well, it's fast), Safari has everything on since it opens up with URLs people give me (which tend to always need JS or flash, etc), and yet a third browser to do research because neither is available for my x86 machine and it has no confidential info on it. Once I have privoxy running full time, I can dump probably....safari and iCab for Firefox and Camino. It's all about features, speed, and compatibility.

[tkmd]

I started to use firefox because of its perceived (faster) rendering speed. But thanks to these comments (esp the terminal line command) Safari is just as fast as firefox; no joke. IMO Safari has built in spelling which FF doesn't and can render pictures in posts. Best of all Pith Helmet blocks those annoying Flash ads.

[drainyoo]

Originally posted by tkmd:
I started to use firefox because of its perceived (faster) rendering speed. But thanks to these comments (esp the terminal line command) Safari is just as fast as firefox; no joke. IMO Safari has built in spelling which FF doesn't and can render pictures in posts. Best of all Pith Helmet blocks those annoying Flash ads.

You are definitely right. Safari for me is now just as fast as FF.

[Since EBCDIC]

Someone also suggested fixing permissions as another speed-up.

Sadly none of these suggestions are helping me. Safari 1.2.3 beachballs (or SBOD or SWOD) for me terribly when I'm loading multiple tabs, or even more frustratingly, when I've got some tab loading which isn't going quickly. All of Safari comes to a screaming halt.

I've actually downloaded OmniWeb 5.0 and used it's import bookmarks function to compare the two. So far OW is more than holding its own against Safari. And I love how the address bar (etc.) dissapear while I'm surfing. Tabs on the side are taking a bit to get used to, but if I can eliminate these annoying pauses I'll be happily writing my upgrade fee cheque.

[nooon]

Originally posted by drainyoo:
You can also easily purge the unused icons from the cache with the following command from Terminal.app:

find $HOME/Library/Safari/Icons -type f -atime +30 -name "*.cache" -delete

Add this to your crontab to run every night. It purges any cached icons which have not been accessed in the past 30 days.

ehh.. Can anyone tell me how I add stuff to my crontab..?

[OptimusG4]

OR---

~/Library/Safari/Icons--> change permission to no access and you won't have to worry about deleting icon cache.

[Cadaver]

Originally posted by gorickey:
7.) Wait for Safari v1.3...

8. Buy a faster Mac.

[Since EBCDIC]

Not so useful. A faster Mac will just get you to a SWOD that much faster :-/