Safari slowdowns: quick & easy fix!

[nagromme]

Hope this will help some people.

My Safari suddenly became very slow to launch, and started giving beachballs a lot. The fix I finally found is easy--and several other people have said it works for them too:

Empty out the Icons folder in your user's Library/Safari folder.

Start Safari up and all should be well. No need to throw out prefs, Reset, repair permissions, or re-install Safari. I've heard some very painful fixes for this problem--and they usually include throwing out a lot more than necessary.

The culprit seems to be a bug regarding the favicons (the little icons on bookmarks). That Icons folder stores the favicons of the places you've visited. It can grow to several MB--but whether that's what triggers the bug I cannot say.

After doing this, your bookmarks will have generic icons. But don't worry, as you visit your bookmarks, each icon will return.

 

[mnkeybsness]

hmmmm....those icons are .cache files...i am confused as to why telling safari to empty cache does not remove all of them...perhaps it is a bug?

 

[thekaiser]

Cocktail Version 2.2.1 has an option to delete Safari bookmark icons when deleting cache files. You can just use it with the pilot and it will be done for you along with repairing permissions etc.

My guess is that Safari doesn't do this on its own as most people want those icons still even if they delete their cache. At least that is what Apple was most likely thinking.

Good day.

 

[Mav451]

This kind of thing also happens to Mozilla Firebird. Usually when i right-click, open in new tab, it takes less than a fraction of a second to open that new tab.

But after a while, it started lagging a bit (a lil more than a few seconds).

I knew i wasn't doing anything CPU intensive. So i cleared my cache (Tools >> Options >> Privacy)

And la Voila, back to normal.

(deleting the cache actually works in firebird, where as IE6 might actually crash when you do so).

 

[nagromme]

Dumping the cache doesn't get rid of those in Safari. In fact, even Reset Safari doesn't.

That's because you still keep your bookmarks--and I guess Apple figured those icons are part of that. (I wish Empty Cache would dump all favicons EXCEPT those for bookmarks.)

 

[mnkeybsness]

i attempted deleting those files, and if anything, all it did was slow safari down more.

 

[nagromme]

That's highly unlikely to slow anything down, since those are icons for places you've been to. Thus, a fresh install of Safari naturally has nothing in that folder.

 

[vollspacken]

I did it and I did not notice ANY difference. I do not keep hundreds of bookmarks though.

vSpacken

 

[nagromme]

The fix helps if you've had the sudden slowdown--which some people don't notice until it's been fixed! But it won't help if you haven't had the slowdown bug.

It's not clear if the bug is directly related to the number of favicons or not. And the number of favicons is not related to the number of bookmarks, but to the number of sites visited (whether bookmarked or not).