[peterauch21]

Does it actually speed anything up? It saddens me to see my XP machine beat my mac in the race of loading web pages. What are your opinions and thoughts?

[jaydon34]

I'm guessing you don't have an Intel Mac , correct?

[peterauch21]

i have a macbook.

[jaydon34]

surprising. I would say empty your cache. But my macbook flies when surfing the net. I don't use safari though. I went to from safari --> Firefox --> Firefox intel optimized --> Camino and then finally settled on Camino intel build as my browser of choice. Its good and offers many of the features that Firefox offers check it out. I'm guess safari won't get any better until 10.5 is released.

[More Cowbell]

What is "Firefox Intel Optimized"?

[kick52]

Originally Posted by More Cowbell 

What is "Firefox Intel Optimized"?

it is a firefox build optimized for intel proccessors, made so it will run faster on those machines.

[Scifience]

I am the developer of SafariSpeed 2.0, so I am a bit biased in this response, but I hope to explain to you how SafariSpeed works and why it does indeed speed up Safari.

SafariSpeed has three features aimed at improving Safari's performance: disabling the page loading delay, disabling favorite icons, and disabling the cache. I'll try and explain what effect each of these has.

When Apple made Safari, they built in a page loading delay. This delay causes the browser to wait one second before it begins to display a page. SafariSpeed removes this delay, so pages begin to be displayed as soon as they are downloaded.

Favorite icons are the small pictures that appear in the address bar next to the web address and in the bookmarks menu and manager. Each time you visit a website, Safari downloads and saves to your computer one of these tiny little pictures to represent the site. Afterwards, every time you load Safari, all of these favorite icons are loaded into memory to generate the pretty pictures for the bookmarks menu. By disabling the storage (but not display, since this has no effect on performance) of these favorite icons, SafariSpeed reduces the time it takes Safari to load.

Finally, disabling the cache can increase performance for users on broadband, since it is often faster to load the page directly from the server rather than from your hard drive.

You can read more about what SafariSpeed does on my website: scifience :: safarispeed

I'll be the first to admit that all of the things SafariSpeed does can be done without it if you know what you are doing and are comfortable using the Terminal (and Developer Tools for the Aqua modification). However, SafariSpeed aims to make it easy for the average user to apply these modifications safely.

If you have any questions, let me know.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by Scifience 

Finally, disabling the cache can increase performance for users on broadband, since it is often faster to load the page directly from the server rather than from your hard drive.

Have you tried this on the latest nightly builds? *Anything* over the network being faster than local points to a highly broken implementation, afaict (which makes some sense, since the released version of Safari is known to have a messed up cache implementation).

[Rev-O]

I've run Safari Speed for some time now and have always been pleased with it. Does it make Safari blindingly fast? Nope. But it was a noticable bump when I first installed it.

[Scifience]

Originally Posted by Catfish_Man 

Have you tried this on the latest nightly builds? *Anything* over the network being faster than local points to a highly broken implementation, afaict (which makes some sense, since the released version of Safari is known to have a messed up cache implementation).

The cache issue isn't nearly as bad in the nightly builds. In the latest nightlies, it is only faster to have the cache off when accessing intranet sites or if you have a *really* fast connection. It is still faster with the cache off on a gigabit fiber link, for example. For the average user, though, this feature will likely lose its usefulness in 10.5 (or whenever they release a fixed version).