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General discussion

My Safari nightmare!

Apr 18, 2007 9:40AM PDT

I've been using Safari ever since I bought my MacBook. It was perfect because it did everything I needed from a web browser, had a nifty little search box, intergrated excellently with the OS and Mail, and did RSS!

Then I opened Activity Monitor... the program was using 500MB of RAM after ramping up about an hour of usage. While I am a very heavy user (50 RSS feeds open, YouTube, CNET, CNET TV, Crave, web based email etc...) I was astonished to find this to be the case.

So, I moved around for a while. I'm a poor student so OmniWeb was impossible. Firefox isn't so great because it is a port. IE was a joke. Camino!

Almost. Camino has no RSS reader. This is a big negative for me, so I grudgingly went back to Safari and the spinning beach ball of death. One particularly nast day (iTunes downloading, Messenger chatting, Safari in all its glory, Mail, QS, and so on...) and the Mac freezes up. I leave it to detangle itself for 15 minutes and decide to move to Camino and Google Reader. Perfect.

Discussion is locked

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if you continue to have problems,
Apr 18, 2007 2:23PM PDT

first roubleshooting step is to repair permissions using the Disk Repair utility that came as part of the OS installation...

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Safari - strange behavior
May 26, 2007 10:30PM PDT

Besides all problems everybody mentioned here, I'd mention a bug I encountered with Safari.

After one year and a half of succesfull use of Safary on a G5 machine, with Tiger 10.4.9, suddenly all link buttons on all sites disappeared. It is possible to go to any page, but not initiate any action (like post a message, pay by credit card, etc.)

I installed the system on an external hard disk and I used the disk utility to "repair the permissions". I got the message that all errors were fixed. But the buttons problem in Safary persists.

Has anybody seen this before or has any idea what could be done? I would not reinstall Safari, as I have lots of bookmarks, favourite links, etc. that I use for doccumentation for my work.

Thanks for eventual future answers!

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Reinstall Safari
May 26, 2007 11:55PM PDT

Don't let all your bookmarks, favourite link, etc. stop you from reinstalling Safari.

You can export all of these to a file, reinstall and then import them back in again.

Another, probably easier method, would be to find where the system puts all that stuff and copy it to another location.
Bookmarks, etc. are stored in HD>User>Your Name >Library > Safari

Hold down the option key and drag that folder onto the desktop. On completion of the reinstall, when you are happy that Safari is working correctly again, you can drag that folder back into the place you got it from.
You will probably find that this folder does not get touched during the reinstall.

P

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Thank You!
May 29, 2007 1:58AM PDT

You were right, the bookmarks stayed on place while reinstalling Safari.

Thanks for encouraging me to do the right action!

I also installed Firefox, to have a spare browser and I even succeded to import the bookmarks in Firefox, maibe it is usefull to know!

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(NT) Well Done
May 29, 2007 2:33AM PDT
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agreed
Jul 14, 2007 5:08AM PDT

agreed. I didn't have that original problem seen at the start of this thread. But I also had to reinsall safari. It's just like you said. Pretty easy and safe.

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Nightmare?
Apr 20, 2007 1:53PM PDT

Well, it sounds more like a bad dream to me, but I must say that Safari bogs down for me too with heavy use. I got the spinning wheel twice in the last few days. That's why I use Firefox most of the time now.

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Replies
Apr 20, 2007 11:21PM PDT
RenoDavid: I read an Arstechnica comparison of various Mac browsers before moving to Camino. Something about FF being optimised for Windows, and while good, the Gecko implementation being done better for Mac by Camino

boya84: Thanks. I run Onyx fairly regularily after tiring of running Unix prompts in Terminal myself. A recent operation seems to have helped a bit, but Camino is lighter and the flexibility of Google Reader works well.
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Safari
Apr 21, 2007 2:39AM PDT

I used to use Firefox until it went to V2 when I found it had a tendency to crash with no apparent reason. Loved the extensibility, but it has always taken ages to load. On my G5 machine, I used to use the variant called Deerpark, which is supposed to be compiled especially for G5 processors. I've found FF2 to be less stable on XP and Ubuntu too.

I tend to use Safari these days, simply because it does do most of the things I want to do(RSS etc) most of the time, but I agree that Camino / Google Reader is a potent combination. Camino just rocks in terms of speed and the user interface is much more Mac like than Safari

Many Mac apps are memory hogs - I've found that even Apple's Mail(e-mail for heavens sake) can grab >500MB of memory, but then I'm a heavy mail user. Unfortunately, the 'Maximum Memory Size' trick you could play on OS 9 is no longer available(unless you resort to some command line wizardry)

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Browser crashing
Apr 21, 2007 3:12AM PDT

It's interesting how different people and different machines have different experiences with the same software. (Interesting sentence!) I can't remember having Firefox crash on me, but it was a fairly regular occurrence with Safari when I opened up too many windows.

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Browser crashing
Apr 23, 2007 12:47AM PDT

I'm thinking of changing from Windows to Mac and would be interested to hear from anyone using Opera on a Mac.

I use this in Windows and find having a browser, email and RSS all in the one application very convenient.