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Safari 4: Web page previews take 4.5Gb

Saladinos

Saladinos

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 26, 2008
1,845
4
I was going about making some space on my MacBook's hard drive, when I noticed a massive folder full of images. The folder was 4.5Gb, and was under:

/private/var/folders/36/36CUaKVfEna30987Ywkm6k+++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews/

As the folder name suggests, this is used for Safari's web preview feature introduced in the Safari 4 Beta. Inside are tens of thousands of images, in JPEG and PNG format (I don't know why both are included).

I thought I'd let you all know how much space Safari 4 is eating. I've deleted the folder and am going back to Safari 3!
 
system resource consumption seems never been a concern in any of apple's products, which I guess is fine if you have large HDD and enough memory, which most current macs do have, they are normally pre-installed with at least 2GB memory and 120Gb HDD.

800MB, 4.5GB, is, IMHO, too much, maybe file a bug to apple. App should be collecting garbage when they are out of use.
 
this is confirmed by many users, I suggest you all file bugs to apple or send feedback, it should be solved before final.

Furthermore, most mac users don't know how to check the hidden files, this make them victim without even know it. Its not good.
 
I'll pitch in here as well.

3.87 gb. Reported to Apple. Chances are it was left off the cache cleaning list when they rushed 4b out the door, and it's going away when 10.5.7 comes out.
 
sammich said:
I'll pitch in here as well.

3.87 gb. Reported to Apple. Chances are it was left off the cache cleaning list when they rushed 4b out the door, and it's going away when 10.5.7 comes out.
Click to expand...
hopefully, we will see when safari 4 got updated. You might want to leave it there and see if update will automatically fix it. Since thats the scenario most normal user will do.
 
clevin said:
hopefully, we will see when safari 4 got updated. You might want to leave it there and see if update will automatically fix it. Since thats the scenario most normal user will do.
Click to expand...

Heh, I don't want to delete it. It's a nice visual history (albeit useless without any searching ability) and the pics are almost good enough to read the text.
 
The file catalogs all of your history and a lot of the new features of Safari 4. I'm not too terribly surprised it's this big.

Remember it's a Beta, not an official release. I bet you anything the official release will be much better.
 
Edit: The "Reset Safari" menu item has an option to clear these out. It works.



I'm clocking in at 550mb and about 2.5k items. Not so bad, but since "Empty Cache" doesn't remove them, they'll only get bigger.
 

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i doubt normal users would have no problem with a browser takes GB spaces, and secretly. Lets wait and see for the final version then.
 
Disable webpage preview images

Disable webpage preview images

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2
 
there are some apps can do that. what i did is using terminal

u can search google for "show hidden files in finder"
 
im interested to know if there is a upper limit to this.

4.5 g so far is biggest
 
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