Speed Up Safari (Very Fast!)

Amie

Amie

Mac Convert for Life
Hey, all. I just wanted to share my experience with you, for those of you who are looking for ways to speed up Safari. A while back, I downloaded OnyX and, while it's a great little utility application for housekeeping, cleaning, etc., its speed-up-Safari feature doesn't work very well. At least, not in my experience. (I still use OnyX for other things, though, so thank you, OnyX developer!) OK, moving right along: I recently downloaded TinkerTool ... and its speed-up-Safari feature *does* work. Wonderfully! I've never seen Safari work so darn fast. In fact, I think it's faster than both Camino and Firefox put together (and I use all three browsers, so this is coming from firsthand experience, not just random guesswork). I can't even *blink* faster than Safari renders a Web page after I made the adjustment with TinkerTool. I'm mucho impresso with this feature. Thank you, TinkerTool!

Anyway, just wanted to let you all know, in case some of you downloaded OnyX and were also disappointed with the Safari-speed feature. If you care to, you can read more (and download) TinkerTool here:

http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/5721
 
I used to use Opera as my main web browser. And I must say wow! It has to be the fastest image renderer / web page renderer I've ever dealt with. If you haven't gave it a try, feel free to! :)
 
SuperTyphoon -- do you own a Macintosh computer? If not, saying you like FireFox over Safari is a bit moot, since you cannot run Safari on your Windows computer, and, in the case that you used Safari at a buddy's house, is not enough experience with Safari to say that FireFox is better than Safari.

While I'm not saying that FireFox is better than Safari or vice-versa, it would help if someone experienced with both FireFox and Safari on a Macintosh computer chimed in, seeing as how this forum is Macintosh-specific.
 
This is a funny kind of trick. I've actually had it on for a year or so (I did it from Terminal, which is easy enough; see below). Back then I found it to make a good difference. But I just downloaded TinkerTool, turned it off, tested Safari, then turned it back on, and....it seems worse with it on. Other people I've recommended the trick to say it makes a negative difference, too. So YMMV.

All TinkerTool (and also SafariSpeed and the like) do is change a setting in Safari's preferences file. The setting determines the initial delay before Safari will begin rendering incoming data. By default, Safari will wait a full second before it begins. The logic behind this is that if you start rendering before you get all the data, then you'll just need to re-render it a split-second later, thus increasing the time it takes to finish rendering the final product. But most people think that having something — anything — to look at sooner is worth this marginal performance hit. But it depends a lot on things like your connection speed, the pages you visit, your computer's speed, etc.

You might want to play with this setting a little more than TinkerTool allows. It's easy to change it using Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/). Just paste this in, and hit return:

defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25

"0.25" is the number of seconds to wait before beginning the render. SafariSpeed, IIRC, uses 0.000001. TinkerTool uses 0.25. The default is 1.0. You might want to experiment a bit to see what works best for you.

You should quit Safari before changing the setting.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
SuperTyphoon -- do you own a Macintosh computer? If not, saying you like FireFox over Safari is a bit moot, since you cannot run Safari on your Windows computer, and, in the case that you used Safari at a buddy's house, is not enough experience with Safari to say that FireFox is better than Safari.

While I'm not saying that FireFox is better than Safari or vice-versa, it would help if someone experienced with both FireFox and Safari on a Macintosh computer chimed in, seeing as how this forum is Macintosh-specific.
Click to expand...

I don't own it, but i am renting it from my school. I use them both on it and i am saying from a mac point of view, i like firefox much better. Am i not clear?

Anyway, why would i say that i hate safari when i can't use it on windows anyway? That's just plain illogical. I wouldn't care if i couldn't use safari, but on my mac i do, but i don't like it.
 
I use both Firefox and Safari every day. Multiple tabs open on both all day long. They each have a different look, which I really don't care about. They both seem to be about the same speed. The main difference for me, I can leave Firefox open for days with no problems. Can't do that with Safari, I have to quit and open it sometimne during the day because it becomes slow.

TinkerTool ... and its speed-up-Safari feature
Click to expand...

TinkerTool doesn't have a feature like this. Only a reduce delay time for page loading.
 
Snaffle said:
I used to use Opera as my main web browser. And I must say wow! It has to be the fastest image renderer / web page renderer I've ever dealt with. If you haven't gave it a try, feel free to! :)
Click to expand...
If it's the fastest browser ... why did you "used" to use it? Why don't you use it anymore?
 
bobw said:
I use both Firefox and Safari every day. Multiple tabs open on both all day long. They each have a different look, which I really don't care about. They both seem to be about the same speed. The main difference for me, I can leave Firefox open for days with no problems. Can't do that with Safari, I have to quit and open it sometimne during the day because it becomes slow.



TinkerTool doesn't have a feature like this. Only a reduce delay time for page loading.
Click to expand...
Right. And that speeds up Safari.
 
Just for the record: I don't "hate" Safari (or ANY of my browsers that I have--except maybe Internet Explorer, but I never use that one anyway, so it doesn't matter). And that guy *points above* didn't really make any sense at all. LOL Anyway: I like Camino, Safari and Firefox, and I use them all. There are certain features that I like about each one, and I like having three competent, fast browsers for variety.

Although ... I DO wish Safari had a prettier user interface. But functionally, I can't complain.
 
I haven't used any of these tools, but from the sounds of it they basically just delay the render and do something like pre-cache the info so it "pops" on screen faster. Is this correct?

If so, that's obviously just an illusion. It doesn't change the fact that from the time you hit enter for a URL to the time it's fully rendered is the same regardless. Unless I'm misunderstanding what's happening here.

I've noticed Firefox seems to blast in pages faster than Safari for me, but again, it's all an illusion. Sure, FF may go from blank to rendered faster, but it sure doesn't go from "click" to final render any faster.

Clarifications? Am I missing something?
 
You're on the right track, but you have it reversed. By default, Safari delays the rendering. Things like TinkerTool reduce that delay, so Safari will render the (incomplete) page sooner. So instead of waiting a full second before you see a more-complete page, you only need to wait a fraction of that to get a less-complete page, and then it will be re-rendered as new data comes in.

It doesn't improve the time to get the finished product, but it does improve the time to get something that's visually useful.

And perceived speed is really the only important thing, right? :)
 
Mikuro said:
You might want to play with this setting a little more than TinkerTool allows. It's easy to change it using Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/). Just paste this in, and hit return:

defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25

"0.25" is the number of seconds to wait before beginning the render. SafariSpeed, IIRC, uses 0.000001. TinkerTool uses 0.25. The default is 1.0. You might want to experiment a bit to see what works best for you.

You should quit Safari before changing the setting.
Click to expand...
Hey that works, cool :)
 
Well, of *course* it's just an illusion. I didn't get into all the technical aspects. Because it doesn't matter. The point here is that TinkerTool makes Safari faster. OK, it gives the *illusion* of Safari being faster, whatever. LOL Does it really matter? No. All the matters is that the Web pages are being rendered faster without the delay, so we can operate faster and surf the Internet and download Web pages faster. Whether or not it actually *makes* Safari faster or it just *seems* faster, it doesn't matter. The end result is the same.

If I had known this was going to turn into a redundant technical discussion, dancing around the point of the original thread, I never would've mentioned it. LOL
 
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