Safari: Delays sometimes triggered by mouse actions - not present with keyboard actions

Several readers have noted an issue where delays -- marked by the dreaded spinning process wheel -- occur in Safari only when actions, such as closing a window or moving to a new text box, are performed with the mouse. When using the keyboard to perform such actions (Command-W to close a window, for instance), the delays do not occur.

MacFixIt reader Dharmachari Padmavyuha writes "Since somewhere in the last two updates (Security or 10.3.4, I'm not sure when it happened) Safari shows beachball delays of around 2 seconds when changing focus within Safari using a mouse click - for example, when clicking on the Close Window button, or clicking onto a text entry field in a web page, or scrolling down. It doesn't do this all the time, and it seems to be independent of History or other caches, as it persists after I've cleared all of the caches.

"The same activities, when triggered by keyboard, do not show this delay. I thought it might by my scrollwheel mouse's Microsoft driver, but uninstalling that made no difference, as did uninstalling PithHelmet. So far, nothing seems to be the culprit apart from Safari itself - this problem doesn't appear in any other app."

A MacFixIt forums thread contains posts from a few other readers experiencing a similar issue. If you are also noticing delays exclusively triggered by mouse-based actions in Safari, please drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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