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Slow Browsing on Macs

W

West of House

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 28, 2005
12
0
So, I have a Mac Mini and an old iMac G4 that both browse the web significantly slower than the PCs on my home network. Has anyone else ever experienced this? The different is at least 500% when loading pages. When I tried out the same Mac Mini in the Apple Store, it loaded pages lickety split, which leads me to believe it's some sort of network issue. Any ideas?

I want to love my new Mac! :)
 
How are you connected to your home network, and what type/speed is your internet connection?
 
Many people around here argue that browsing is indeed faster on PCs and I find this true to an extent, but only sites that are obviously set up for Internet Explorer and then the competition isn't so much between PC and Mac but rather IE and every other browser in the world.

The Macs shouldn't be 500% slower, I think it's more likely to be a network problem so please explain how you connect to the internet from both the PCs and the Macs. :)
 
Wow, I installed that SafariSpeed thing and it seems to have made a pretty noticable difference in speed for me. Thanks for posting it! :)
 
I'm sharing a cable connection among two PCs and two Macs (Linksys router, 10/100). To be more clear, there's no real problem display the page, the main problem appears to be that the computer takes an extremely long time during the "Contacting" phase of loading a page.
 
In that case, you'll probably enjoy the SafariSpeed link. AFAIK, Safari likes to wait until the whole page is downloaded before displaying so it is actually set to not load immediately. SafariSpeed gets around this and displays pages as they are downloaded. :)
 
mad jew said:
In that case, you'll probably enjoy the SafariSpeed link. AFAIK, Safari likes to wait until the whole page is downloaded before displaying so it is actually set to not load immediately. SafariSpeed gets around this and displays pages as they are downloaded. :)
Click to expand...

Or...if you want to avoid running programs just to maintain your system (a la windoze), you could open up terminal and paste in:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay -float 0.25

Which changes the delay from 1 to .25

To stop the cookies or the favicons from saving up, just write protect your icons folder in the library, and it won't save it in there.

Whew, there ya go. :)
 
SafariSpeed made not one tiny bit of difference on my PB. Every page that loaded nearly instantaneously continued to do so, and every page that took 1-2 seconds continued to do so as well. :rolleyes:
 
ohcrap said:
SafariSpeed made not one tiny bit of difference on my PB. Every page that loaded nearly instantaneously continued to do so, and every page that took 1-2 seconds continued to do so as well. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...


I don't bother with it either. I think the biggest effect of it is probably placebo-based, but shh, don't tell the people who use it. ;)

Oh, and thanks for the tip aznsal612.
 
I actually think browsing the web is faster on my Mac than my PC. Then again, I am using a dial-up connection. :rolleyes: :mad:
 
NEENAHBOY said:
Just to be clear, does the app have to be open while browsing?
Click to expand...


no. its a one time patch but its good to keep it around if you want to undo the changes or use the other options it has.

some think safarispeed just makes pages seem to load faster but it truly does. I have noticed a big diff. using it with safari 2 in tiger.
 
mad jew said:
In that case, you'll probably enjoy the SafariSpeed link. AFAIK, Safari likes to wait until the whole page is downloaded before displaying so it is actually set to not load immediately. SafariSpeed gets around this and displays pages as they are downloaded. :)
Click to expand...
Tried it out and it didn't make a visible difference in my browsing speed. I think, probably because my computer isn't having trouble displaying the page as it's loading/after it's loading, but it just takes forever to "contact" a server.

I tried pinging my router, and the speed was roughly comparable on my Macs as on my PCs, so I don't think the router is the issue.
 
As a further update, someone suggested I try going to websites by IP address instead of domain name (bypassing DNS lookup), and I found that this is very quick. So, it would seem that there's something wrong with my DNS setup? Does that sound reasonable?

And, if that is the problem, how can I even go about trying to fix it?
 
Okay, I tried connecting my Mac directly into my cable modem, and the problem appeared to go away intermittently. Going back to the router, it came right back again, so it seems like maybe my router is at fault. Linksys's customer service was worthless ("We have limited Mac support.") so I'm at a loss now. Maybe I just need to switch everything to Airport. ;)

I'm more or less at square one... For some reason, my Mac is taking forever to resolve domain names. Bizarre.
 
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