what to do when Safari gets sluggish

[Mr Downtown]

In the last week, I spend a lot of time looking at the spinning beachball and waiting for even sites like Google to load. On that other board I was once advised to trash a plist file, but I think that affected my bookmarks.

[Speedy]

Relaunch Safari.

Empty its cache under the Safari menu.

If you are trying to open a bunch of links/urls at once, press and hold the option key while clicking on the links. They will download to the place you have designated for downloads, in my case, the desktop; and they will do so much faster than if you are opening the pages in tabs. Then just click on the downloaded files to view the page.

Reboot the computer.

Use Opera or Firefox.

My gripe is that I cannot download a standalone installer for Safari for Tiger.

[C(-)ris]

I bet emtpying your cache will take care of your problem.

[guitarist]

You're assuming it's a Safari problem. Spinning beach ball is also and indicator that physical RAM is maxed out. Do you have something like, 512 RAM? or are you up around 1--1.5--2GB memory? Anything under 1GB memory on modern macs running OSX can occasionally have its limits tested, and exceeded. Safari can be RAM hungry if you're a power user.

You didn't mention what kind of computer you have. Is it old? New? Is it a G4? G3? G5?

[JoeM]

On 10.3.5: Safari slowed to a crawl with the beach ball thingy spinning if I even tried to scroll the page down.

I ran Disk Utility and repaired the startup disk, then repaired permissions and everything is pretty much zipping along again.