Safari 5.1 Performance
 

Mac OS 10.6.8 On a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini
Safari 5.1 (6534.50)

Every morning I open a bunch (10) of tabs to get my daily dose of world news, Mac news and my favorite comics. As I'm reading, some tabs get closed and new ones get opened. This has always worked fairly well.

Enter Safari 5.1. Often when I open a new tab the content in all open tabs disappears until the new tab fully loads. So, if I click from tab to tab all I see is blank pages. This is frustrating because I always used to be able to read an already-open tab while a newly opened tab loads.

I've yet to take any time to troubleshoot this, but I wonder if anyone else is noticing the same thing.

Not me. I always read pages while others load in the background. Maybe you could try resetting some of the Safari stuff (Safari > Reset Safari).

Yeah, it doesn't happen all the time. I have reset Safari a couple of times since I installed it. I will install the latest System update today and see if that solves the problem. I've also had WebProcess crash a few times since installing 5.1.

Here's even more Safari 5.1 weirdness. Now and then it insists that it is not connected to the Internet:

http://www.mgnewman.com/td/internet1.JPG

Even though Tansmission's continuous up and download performance indicates otherwise:

http://www.mgnewman.com/td/internet2.JPG

In this instance after about three or four minutes Safari realized that it was indeed connected to the Internet and proceeded to download the requested page. Very odd.

Here's another bit of weirdness. If I click on the "Link" icon above (world and chain) a dialog box pops up into which I can paste a URL.

If I do that:

http://www.mgnewman.com

and then hit the "OK" button, the entire web page disappears for just a second before reappearing with the URL tag and link in place. Never happened like that in Safari 5.0 or before.

Same thing seems to happen with any tag (eg: Image) that throws up a dialog box.

Sounds like maybe it is crashing? Check the logs.

So, the momentary disappear does not happen for you?

I created a brand new user and tried it and, bingo, the entire page disappears just as the link is being inserted. So, it's not just on my account.

Nothing that I can see in the logs.

Macworld has an article up about how to revert to the last version of Safari. While they don't provide a source link for downloading the last version, I just downloaded it here.

Thanks for that. After reading some posts over on Macintouch, I see I'm not the only one with difficulties:

Surprised I haven't seen similar reports here.

I successfully reverted using the instructions I linked. Took me 5 minutes and got Safari running smoothly again for me under 10.6.8.

Same here. 1Password plugin no longer works, but I guess I can sort that.

It's amazing how awful 5.1 is compared to 5.0.3. What were they thinking?

Thanks for the tip.

Safari 5.1 was a disappointment (still on OSX10.6.8) but I also thought it was just me:

My favourite add-on, SafariStand, didn't work,
While using Little Snitch, every single web page and web element asked the Allow/Deny question, and
The AutoFill of login/password info didn't happen.

Maybe I could have sorted these things out in time but it was much quicker to invoke Time Machine and backtrack to V5.0.5. And oddly, after reverting to 5.0.5, Software Update no longer offers 5.1 as an update.

Interesting. I reinstalled 5.0.3 and Software Update almost immediately offered 5.1 as an update.

The problem I have with Safari 5.1 is the tab behavior. Say I have tabs A, B, and C open, and am focused on tab A, I will apple click a link on tab A to open an article in new tab D, Safari used to open the new tab D at the end of the line, now Safari will open new tab D next to tab A. Anyway to get the old behavior back? I have looked at the tab preferences but can't figure it out. I don't know if it is enough to make me revert, though.

I just read about this extension for forcing the old-style behavior.

NaOH,

Thanks! Have you tried the extension yet?

I just realized it's trying to be smarter. If you cmd-click to open a new tab, it will open to the right of the current tab. But if you cmd-click more links from the same site, they'll open to the right of the that one and so on, not next to the current tab. If you go to another site and start cmd-clicking it will behave the same way. I think I might like this.

Here is how it works:

Sites open: A, B, C, D

Command-click a link on A and you get A, A1, B, C, D
Cmd-click another on A and you get A, A1, A2, B, C, D
Do it again and you get A, A1, A2, A3, B, C, D
Now go to site site C and cmd-click, you get A, A1, A2, A3, B, C, C1, D
Cmd-click another on C and you get A, A1, A2, A3, B, C, C1, C2, D

See how it works?

Yes, I have, in my 10.7 install. I only used it briefly because I only use Lion for testing purposes, so I'm never booted into that OS for very long. It worked fine as far as I could tell.

I'd say it's trying to use a different logic for tab opening. Whether it's smarter or not, I don't know. But it does mess with the browsing system I've used for about 12 years. I typically have a few tabs which remain open as they're my frequent go-to sites. For how my head works, I don't want anything coming between those tabs.

In the time I used Safari 5.1 under 10.6—admittedly not a terribly long time—I had trouble overcoming my expectations and finding the new logic beneficial. I'll give it another shot whenever I make the jump to 10.7 with Safari 5.1. If I still prefer the older logic, I'll use something like the above-linked extension. If no such option exists, I'll have to adapt to the new style, try different browsers, etc.

I will report that the extension works as described. No problems here.

This was solved when LS got updated to the latest.

Here's an article about the behavior I reported in the OP:

Bugs & Fixes: Safari web content maladies

Safari 5.1.2, released today, apparently fixes this blank-page issue. A 10.6 or a 10.7 version is available for download. Things seems fine so far in my limited use.

So far, so good here as well...

The update said it also fixed an issue relating to memory usage.

Both Safari and the Web Content process seem to be using much less memory now, which is excellent news.

Now, not so good. Every morning I open 10 web sites in tabs. This morning, the following two were completely blank:

http://hints.macworld.com/headlines.php

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/

and the formatting was completely broken on this one:

http://www.tuaw.com/

All three pages displayed correctly after manually reloading.

But then, while writing this post I went back to look at each of 7 still-open tabs. All were completely blank when I first clicked on them. I had to wait five or ten seconds for each page to be redrawn.

I should note that Time Machine was backing up during this time with mdworker (and mdworker32?) doing their cpu-hogging deeds.