On my G5, and mini, Safari runs pretty well. No major issues other than that on the mini it suffers the memory leak problem which means that after a couple of days of continuous use it gets a bit sluggish. Qutiing and restarting resolves the problem completely. It has the same memory leak problem on the G5 too of course, but even after a week, does not cause any performance issues.
BUT, running Safari on my old G4/450 Sawtooth is a lesson in frustration. On this system the memory leak problem doesn't seem to occur, but clicking on almost any link on any page pushes the CPU to 100% (Activity Monitor shows Safari has about 87-93% of that) and the spinning beachball appears. The stall lasts anything from just under a second to maybe 10 seconds, depending on which site is involved - and ironically, Apple's web site (particularly the support and dicussion areas) are the worst!
All systems are running 10.4.2 and have 512Mb RAM - actually the G4/450 has a bit more than that. It makes web browsing on the G4 a tedious activity.
Oddly, in Panther and Jaguar the G4 was perfectly usable with the prior issues of Safari, and since it has 3 internal drives, I'm going to do a bit of experimentation by loading Jaguar on one, Panther on another and retaining Tiger on the primary and booting alternately from each to see how the different OS/Safari versions impact on performance and use.
It seems to me that from the time when Safari was released, when Apple rightly proclaimed the amazing speed it achieved in accessing and loading pages, subsequent iterations have become more and more bloated - to the point where it has little other than simplicity of use going for it.
