Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

Over the past few weeks Safari started chewing up the CPU and causing my MacBook Pro to sound like it’s going to take flight. This of course chews up the battery as well.

At first, I thought there was Flash running in one of the pages I load regularly since Flash has a number of issues running well on a Mac. My other thought was that one of the sites I visit regularly has some weird JavaScript bug. The CPU usage would just start climbing at some point; I couldn’t pin down what the cause was or the exact steps to recreate it.

So today I fire it up and Safari immediately starts to devour system resources. Fed up, I do all of the usual things: disabled plug-ins, moved the contents out of ~/Library/Safari, watched the Console for odd messages. Nothing seemed to do it.

Then in occurred to me to try something as a web developer I do all the time: Empty the Browser Cache. (Safari > Empty Cache…)

Disco! It seems once the cache gets to a certain point in Safari, it begins to struggle.

Sometimes the answer is simple.

Hope this helps.

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For a long time I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the performance of Firefox 2 on my Mac. The Mozilla folk will blame it on plug-ins and such, but I’ve done a lot of tweaking, hacking, and research and it’s just got issues.

The main issue is the memory bleeding. Every other day requires I shut down Firefox and restart it. The second is occasional responsiveness even before the memory leakage fires up. On the Safari side, the new Webkit builds keep getting faster, and being an iPhone user, the consolidation and ease of syncing bookmarks is not without its appeal. This doesn’t mean Firefox is out, the wide selection of plug-ins/add-ons still makes it my go to browser for development and debugging; I’m just trying it in the second string position.

Speaking of plug-ins, this may be the biggest flaw in using Safari: Not a lot of development for plug-ins and not easily extensible. The biggest resource I’ve found so far is a site called Pimp My Safari, which has been helpful, but doesn’t seem to be updated frequently. So I’ve been compiling a list of the features I want/need ported from Firefox to make this browser switch stick:

• Click RSS icon and add to Google Reader or other online reader. Since I access feeds from both my Mac and my iPhone, I use an online reader. I want to easily click that “RSS” icon in the address bar and assign that feed where I want.
• Multiple session session-saver. You can load your last session, but I want the option to save multiple sessions and jump back to a specific ones.
• Some refinement to the very impressive Safari Web Inspector. Namely the ability to click “Inspect” and select a section of the page like Firebug.
• I like to search right from the location bar. My biggest frustration right now is that muscle memory has my typing search terms in and getting a Safari error page.
• A plugin to post directly to Delicious. Bookmarklets are fine, but I want tighter integration, once again like the delicious plugin for Firefox.

I’m sure I’ll find some others and will update this post; I’m only in day two of the test. If you have solutions or know of good plug-ins for Safari, please let me know.

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