Safari 5.0.5 vs 5.1.7

[tpth]

Hey all, I'm running Safari 5.0.5 on OS X 10.6.8 - early 2011 MacBook Pro, 8GB RAM, SSD, etc. I upgraded to Safari 5.1 when it was released, but the whole experience was so horrible - slow performance, inactive tabs unilaterally refreshing themselves, etc - that I downgraded.

So, a question: is 5.1.7 any better in this respect, or am I better off staying with 5.0.5? Clearly 5.0.5 is old and not getting security updates, and I'd prefer to be running an up-to-date browser, but not if the user experience is awful. Thoughts appreciated.

[blatopilot]

Originally Posted by tpth

Hey all, I'm running Safari 5.0.5 on OS X 10.6.8 - early 2011 MacBook Pro, 8GB RAM, SSD, etc. I upgraded to Safari 5.1 when it was released, but the whole experience was so horrible - slow performance, inactive tabs unilaterally refreshing themselves, etc - that I downgraded.

So, a question: is 5.1.7 any better in this respect, or am I better off staying with 5.0.5? Clearly 5.0.5 is old and not getting security updates, and I'd prefer to be running an up-to-date browser, but not if the user experience is awful. Thoughts appreciated.

I think 5.1.7 is as stable as Safari has ever been.

What you could do if you are unhappy with it, is download the 10.6.8 combo update, which does not install 5.1.7 (last I checked). I would suggest you research that a bit, but that would be a quick way to back out of 5.1.7 if you are unhappy. (I don't think you will get 5.0.5 with the combo update fyi)

[N10248]

Safari 5.0.5 is one of the many reasons i'm still using Snow Leopard, mainly for the ability to properly manage cookies and much better performance than later versions.

A good tip though is to turn off the "fraudulent website warning" option as it causes constant disk activity as it checks every page you visit against a blacklist which slows it down a lot.

[jnpy!$4g3cwk]

I'm committed to Lion and ML now, so, no going back. But, the last couple of Safari releases have been much worse. Constant crashing and very slow, if you use a lot of tabs. And, the "Safari Web Content" process uses a huge amount of memory.

I think the constant crashing is probably a result of pre-existing bugs colliding with the new security constraints. But, it is getting very old. I wish Apple would send a team after it to clean up.

I still say that Snowleopard was overall the cleanest.