3 ms·

While safari has a fast rendering engine, and most of its performance benchmarks makes it out to be competitive - I don't know what it is - but it simply /feels

While safari has a fast rendering engine, and most of its performance benchmarks makes it out to be competitive - I don't know what it is - but it simply /feels/ slower. Less responsive - from beachballs on link clicks to loading up the initial 3D eyecandy. Than Chrome on windows, that is.

ionfish 17y ago
Safari feels fast to me, but it's an open question how much our respective views are shaped by our preconceptions about our respective preferred browsers. Are you using it on Windows, or on OS X? I don't know (because I don't use it on Windows) what its performance is like on Windows, although as InclinedPlane pointed out upthread, Apple have less incentive to optimise there. If it's slow on OS X, perhaps you view a lot of sites with Flash content. The OS X Flash Player is pretty awful (I use ClickToFlash [1] to block it), and a frequent harbinger of the beachball. I also tend to disable the "initial 3D eyecandy", because it does slow things down, and for me at least it's pretty pointless. [1]: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/ http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
- DTrejo 17y ago
  It would be interesting to do a study of which browser people think is fastest (based on a trial of all the browsers somehow perfectly skinned to look like other ones).
- warfangle 17y ago
  That was on OSX - I always ended up going back to Firefox, because it felt faster. I'm no longer using OSX as my primary, so it doesn't matter much anymore to me :) Just pointing out what I'd noticed.
- mdemare 17y ago
  I had a lot of problems with beachballs on Safari. Ten seconds of unresponsiveness were by no means exceptional. I upgraded my laptop HD to a SSD and these problems vanished utterly.
mikepurvis 17y ago
Since Snow Leopard, I found the 3D eye candy page extremely slow and frustrating, to the point that I disabled it in favour of just about:blank. I wasn't using the bookmarks anyway.
sjs 17y ago
It's the same on OS X, imho. I've carried around my preferences and such for some years now, from an old PPC G4 Mac Mini, so I cleared out some Safari cache databases and that helped startup delays a bit, but Chrome's dev preview for OS X still eats every other browser's lunch. Chrome on Linux and Windows are just as fast in my experience but I haven't used it on Linux as much as the others.

ionfish 17y ago

Safari feels fast to me, but it's an open question how much our respective views are shaped by our preconceptions about our respective preferred browsers. Are you using it on Windows, or on OS X? I don't know (because I don't use it on Windows) what its performance is like on Windows, although as InclinedPlane pointed out upthread, Apple have less incentive to optimise there. If it's slow on OS X, perhaps you view a lot of sites with Flash content. The OS X Flash Player is pretty awful (I use ClickToFlash [1] to block it), and a frequent harbinger of the beachball. I also tend to disable the "initial 3D eyecandy", because it does slow things down, and for me at least it's pretty pointless. [1]: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/ http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

DTrejo 17y ago
It would be interesting to do a study of which browser people think is fastest (based on a trial of all the browsers somehow perfectly skinned to look like other ones).
warfangle 17y ago
That was on OSX - I always ended up going back to Firefox, because it felt faster. I'm no longer using OSX as my primary, so it doesn't matter much anymore to me :) Just pointing out what I'd noticed.
mdemare 17y ago
I had a lot of problems with beachballs on Safari. Ten seconds of unresponsiveness were by no means exceptional. I upgraded my laptop HD to a SSD and these problems vanished utterly.

mikepurvis 17y ago

Since Snow Leopard, I found the 3D eye candy page extremely slow and frustrating, to the point that I disabled it in favour of just about:blank. I wasn't using the bookmarks anyway.

sjs 17y ago

It's the same on OS X, imho. I've carried around my preferences and such for some years now, from an old PPC G4 Mac Mini, so I cleared out some Safari cache databases and that helped startup delays a bit, but Chrome's dev preview for OS X still eats every other browser's lunch. Chrome on Linux and Windows are just as fast in my experience but I haven't used it on Linux as much as the others.