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Websites that bring Safari to its knees

W

workerbee

macrumors regular
Original poster
Like any good Apple user, I've been using Safari as my main browser for just about as long as it existed, with various Firefoxes, Edges, and other assorted browsers as backups.
Lately I've noticed two websites that seem to really trouble Safari for some reason, while other browsers have no problems.
  • Infomaniak.ch -- this renders the entire M1 MBA nearly unusable, with Safari Graphics and Media eating up to almost ~600% CPU for minutes at a time
  • polylang.pro -- Safari Graphics and Media doesn't go quite as bonkers as in the above, but the site is pretty much unusable, scrolling into empty spaces, haphazard visual updates, and really painful writing experience for login and other forms
Is that just in my installation, maybe some weird combination effect of Wipr blocker and NextDNS not playing along, or is there something more fundamental affecting Safari here and everyone can see this?

I tried various combinations of enabling a VPN, using Safari developer preview, disabling extensions, but have not yet found a real solution; I'm suspecting there's some JavaScript sillyness going on.
Even now with the infomaniak site open in another Safari window, typing this post is noticeably stuttery.
 
I did a quick test. With my Safari 26.2 on Sequoia (no plugins or anything else, M4Pro 24GB). Infomaniak causes a 500% spike for a few moments when opening and then works normally (although it consumes more than average, about 50% CPU). The other site, on the other hand, is terrible, consuming “only” 125% but difficult to even scroll through.

It seems to work well with Firefox.
 
For me, with Safari 26.2 on Sequoia 15.7.3 on a M3 Air (16 GB RAM) the first website takes a while to load up (with huge spikes in CPU usage in Activity Monitor) but after a moment it is usable. The second website keeps stuttering.
 
workerbee said:
Like any good Apple user, I've been using Safari as my main browser for just about as long as it existed, with various Firefoxes, Edges, and other assorted browsers as backups.
Lately I've noticed two websites that seem to really trouble Safari for some reason, while other browsers have no problems.
  • Infomaniak.ch -- this renders the entire M1 MBA nearly unusable, with Safari Graphics and Media eating up to almost ~600% CPU for minutes at a time
  • polylang.pro -- Safari Graphics and Media doesn't go quite as bonkers as in the above, but the site is pretty much unusable, scrolling into empty spaces, haphazard visual updates, and really painful writing experience for login and other forms
Is that just in my installation, maybe some weird combination effect of Wipr blocker and NextDNS not playing along, or is there something more fundamental affecting Safari here and everyone can see this?

I tried various combinations of enabling a VPN, using Safari developer preview, disabling extensions, but have not yet found a real solution; I'm suspecting there's some JavaScript sillyness going on.
Even now with the infomaniak site open in another Safari window, typing this post is noticeably stuttery.
Click to expand...

Interesting example websites and guessing you're seeing WebKit issues, especially recent versions that don't handle these sites well.

Few quick tests (did not invest much effort to control all variables):
  • MacBook Air i3 Catalina
    • Safari (15.6)
      • First website comes up a little slow then is reasonably responsive though also drives a lot of CPU and drives WindowServer to runaway with RAM (also this Safari has no WebP support...)
      • Second website looks okay but also drives a Safari process to consume lots of CPU and RAM
    • Orion (WebKit 619):
      • Similar to above but Orion is actually slower than that old Safari on this website
      • Ditto -- this website is almost unusable with this version of Orion/WebKit
    • Brave (1.69.168):
      • Fully usable and wouldn't have noticed it's CPU/etc utilization if I wasn't looking; other applications are a little more sluggish while this is open
      • Looks fine, no extra CPU usage, and RAM usage not unusual for websites these days
  • MacBook Air M1 Sonoma
    • Safari (26.2):
      • Extremely slow even just to open; drives lots of CPU like you mentioned; scrolls fine once open
      • Similar as far as speed; proper layout does eventually catchup
    • Orion (WebKit 624.1.2.19.2):
      • Similar to Safari -- slow to even open, drives lots of CPU, but also consumes multiple GB of RAM
      • Ditto but also sluggish scrolling
    • Brave (1.86.148):
      • Similar to Brave above though feels slightly slower
      • Similar to Brave above and sometimes Safari is using more CPU with MacRumors open and idle (but no adblockers, etc) than Brave does with this website open
As a rough guide of recent WebKit's issues on the first website, Catalina's Safari 15.6 on my i3 opened it ~ 3x faster than Sonoma's Safari 26.2 on my M1. Orion (WebKit 624) on the M1 was about the same as Safari 26.2. Orion (webKit 619) on the i3 was about half the speed -- the slowest of all combinations.

All of which goes to show it's not the size of the tool but what you do with it. In this case, a properly written website beats an efficient browser beats fast hardware. All else being equal I'd rather run Brave on an i3 over Safari on an M1 if those were my only two options and I had to work with websites like these. Though a properly written website would run equally well in all these browsers on an M1 without it even having to try.

As far as your situation, don't use these websites in Safari or any WebKit-based browser. Consider reporting them to WebKit project (https://www.webkit.org) with comparison of their resource usage relative to other browsers. Just note that if they do respond to your submission they will probably tell you these websites are abusing the standard or doing something wrong. At which point you have to decide if you want to be the go-between among all the parties.
 
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Okay, I had time to test it with Tahoe 26.3 beta 3 (Safari 26.3) on a MacBook M1Pro 16GB. Infomaniak does not cause the spike and works normally, the other site does not cause high CPU consumption but remains extremely jerky, to the point of being unusable.
 
Thanks a lot all for testing, and really interesting feedback... it's quite calming to know when one is not alone in seeing these issues 😀
I might report both sites to the Webkit project, as per @bzgnyc2 … I admit being intensely curious as to what exactly is causing (recent?) Webkits to behave like that where Firefox and Chromium/Edge don't seem to have problems, especially for the polylang site. I'll probably wait for Tahoe 26.3, though.
 
Apparently, Apple is listening, and they released Tahoe 26.3 right away.

The Infomaniak site seems more or less fine with Safari 26.3, at least it's not particularly annoying anymore, just lots and lots of unneeded effects.
Polylang is still struggling – I strongly suspect it's whatever they're doing with the header on scroll and also they seem to be trying to control the browser scrollbar display, both of which may be what throws Safari off.

Anyway, glad Tahoe seems to be moving in the right direction and get better, not worse, which nowadays in tech and with Apple is not always to be expected.
 
workerbee said:
Apparently, Apple is listening, and they released Tahoe 26.3 right away.

The Infomaniak site seems more or less fine with Safari 26.3, at least it's not particularly annoying anymore, just lots and lots of unneeded effects.
Polylang is still struggling – I strongly suspect it's whatever they're doing with the header on scroll and also they seem to be trying to control the browser scrollbar display, both of which may be what throws Safari off.

Anyway, glad Tahoe seems to be moving in the right direction and get better, not worse, which nowadays in tech and with Apple is not always to be expected.
Click to expand...

Agree both pretty usable now on an M1 with Safari 26.3 (tested under Sonoma). I would even say Polylang scrolls smoother on Safari 26.3 than Brave on the same machine. I do see that both websites cause even this Safari to use a lot more CPU than Brave. Not as bad as before but ideally Safari would be at least as efficient.

Also ideally these websites would be optimized not to need to so much hardware/browser/etc. I don't see anything they are doing that should drive any computer Raspberry Pi 2 and above to its knees...
 
Wow, those are such poorly coded sites! Speaking as a webmaster myself.

They are both doing many things wrong which is causing the issues that WebKit is experiencing. Tried with Monterey Safari 17 and the first one is not that bad at all but the second one has delays. It shows up in PageSpeed testing as well, which uses Chrome. First one is the worst with a performance rating of only 13% with a cell phone. The details on PageSpeed speaks for itself. I can't believe a web site could be so poorly made in this day and age.

Whomever made either of those two sites needs to go back to learn how to build a web site. No reason users should have such a poor experience in 2026, regardless of what browser they are using or where it is hosted.
 
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workerbee said:
Agree 100%. I'm probably being really old-school about this, but losing usability for purely decorative animations and fancy header transparency is a strict no-no in my book.
Click to expand...

Agree with the addition is that I've seen websites with roughly equivalent ornamantation that don't bring previous browser on previous generation hardware to a crawl. I'm suspicious of any website that can't run well on a Raspberry Pi 2 with Firefox. Unfortunately that includes most these days.
 
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