I've been running 10.5.2 with Leopard for a few days and my browsing speed has become noticeably slower than it was with my cranky old PC!. This is very disappointing as I really expected the Mac's higher spec would improve not diminish my browsing experience. I know there's not much I can do about the speed of my local exchange (I have a DSL connection) but is there any way to make Firefox and/or Safari run faster on my system?
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Internet browsing slower than PC!
- Thread starter stringtheorist
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Hmm, some bittorrent clients cause problems with Mac OS X for some reason are you using any P2P apps?
To be honest I feel that browsing with Safari is slower in Leopard than it was in Tiger. Safari seems to wait for the external drives to spin up before displaying the page. VERY VERY annoying.
I'm using Safari 3.1 too.
I'm using Safari 3.1 too.
So, if I choose Reset Safari, what exactly gets reset - what do I lose? Would links, cookies, etc., get wiped out?
Would Empty Cache speed things up or just get back some disk space?
Would Empty Cache speed things up or just get back some disk space?
Choose that menu item and see for yourself.
Seriously, do it...the "
" in a menu item means that selecting it will bring up a dialog of some sort where you have to make choices, and that nothing will happen immediately. Empty Cache will slow things down, because anything that was in the cache will have to be downloaded again. (Although my one real complaint about Safari is that it tends not to use the cache as much as it should, as compared to Firefox for example, and there's no way to set its size.)Anyway, it's highly unlikely that Safari is actually slower; the problem is elsewhere. You can try setting your DNS servers to something, like the OpenDNS servers.
--Eric
if you are running flash animations, macs are slower
(a reason i don't understand why are they liked by graphic designers)
(a reason i don't understand why are they liked by graphic designers)
Duh - thanks for pointing that out. Sometimes we don't see what we are looking at.
Cheers
Or, use the formula for defragmenting your Safari cache (for 10.5 only). You only have to do this once, if you wait until the cache reaches the maximum 180MB in size.
try flushing your DNS cache this solved a Safari browsing problem for me a while ago. type this command into Terminal and press enter.
Code:
dscacheutil -flushcacheI have also thought it seemed a little bit slower. So, I hooked a 10.5 external drive to my 10.4 blackbook and tried it out. After Spotlight was done doing junk, Safari seemed to load pages just about as fast as it felt on 10.4. What I did notice is that the refresh rate of the graphics seems lower in 10.5 than on 10.4. This might be the cause for 'feeling' that Leopard is 'less snappy' than Tiger. The user interface may not be running at as high a priority or refresh rate under 10.5. This may be a side effect of the overhaul done on the kernel to handle multicore properly. More horsepower, but lower top speed. BSD & especially Linux often play tug-of-war over where the balance should be.
Considering it took until February 11 to get the GUI effects & graphic drivers straightened out, there is a chance some of this will be 'fixed' in 5.3 or 5.4. Whatever the system is doing at 5.4 is probably the best it will ever be in Leopard.