Spinning Beach Ball with Web Browsers

[SeaDour]

Hi all,

Over the past couple days I have been getting the spinning "beach-ball-o-death" while using my web browsers (both Firefox and Safari, latest versions). As soon as it's almost done loading a page, the beach ball pops up for 10-15 seconds before letting me navigate a simple page. When loading gmail, the beach ball persists indefinitely before even displaying the page, and I have to force quit the browser. I have tried a reboot to no avail. I also quit Google Desktop thinking it might be the culprit, but it hasn't helped any.

I haven't installed anything lately, though I did upgrade from 1 GB to 2 GB of RAM about a month or so ago.

20" intel iMac Core Duo, OS 10.4.9

Many thanks in advance.

 

[MacsRgr8]

What I sometimes do to try to eliminate the fact that maybe some corrupt pref might be the culprit, I create a new user account, and see if the problems persist.
If so, then it is not a pref.

 

[Angrist]

Run a memory tester on your RAM.

Those problems sound like you've got a bad stick (or a poorly seated stick).

 

[fairnymph]

Try Opera? It often succeeds where other browsers fail, for me at least.

 

[localoid]

Have you checked your local network and your ISP's connectivity? High packet loss, abnormally high latency, etc. can cause Web pages to be very slow to load, or even cause them to "hang" vs. simply timing out, esp. on pages that make great use of client-side scripting.

 

[Dapperdan]

Hello I've been getting sort of the same problem, but only in my user account not my administrator account, there both Safari and Camino work fine. In my user account Safari makes the Spinning Beach ball appear when I try to fill a form field, for example typing something on google for it to search or with my webmail when I try to search for a specific mail. With Camino the beach ball appears as soon as I open it, the startup page doesn't even load.

Here's what I've done so far: Disk utility repair permissions and repair disk (there was a small problem that needed repair disk now fixed). I've also went into Safari, Preferences, autofill, other and cleaned the contents of that. Also Safari, get info and unchecked a few languages I didn't need. Still the problems persist.

Any ideas to what's causing this and how can I fix it? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.