I have been using Safari for like my whole life, and I have never seen it load websites so slowly as of 2026. Safari use to be the fastest browser in the world, but now it is clearly not. I have fast 200-300 Mbps WiFi, less than 20 ns latency, and a MacBook Air M2, and website still can like hang for 1-2 seconds before reloading even in fully cached websites, even on sights like Wiki or a old 1990s website like 1996 Park.org. Why is Safari so slow, especially for loading YouTube (5-6 seconds to load)? I use Chrome, and Chrome loads sites much faster, including YouTube. Safari also seems to use much more RAM too. You have 9 GB used before and then it goes to 11 GB used just opening a few tabs. Chrome also seems to work better with website compatibility too. I remember the 2020-2021 era with M1, I remember how fast and instant M1 Macs loaded websites, YouTube loaded in like less than a second. Now it feels like a Intel Mac again. How do I clear the junk or the cache in Safari? I can only see website history.
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Why is Safari such a slow browser compared to Chrome?
- Thread starter Red29359
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Have you turned off Hide IP address & Private Relay?
https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/sfri35610/
https://support.apple.com/102022
https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/sfri35610/
https://support.apple.com/102022
I ditched Safari more than 22 years ago and have used a variety of other browsers. Periodically, I will use Safari for a specific purpose but not for normal browsing.
Maybe find another browser? Aside from the fact that Apple just prefers that you use their apps, there is nothing except habit holding you back.
Maybe find another browser? Aside from the fact that Apple just prefers that you use their apps, there is nothing except habit holding you back.
That's why I use a Chromium browser on Mac. Safari isn't the best at all.
I only use it on iOS devices.
I only use it on iOS devices.
Dang. Light can only travel about 6 meters in 20 nanoseconds ... so you must be measuring from your machine to your router that's at the edge of your desk? 🤓
I use Safari 99% of the time, but a bank website I deal with doesn't play nice, so I have to use Chrome. I find that Chrome is slower than Safari, but I only use it for this one website.
Surely you could use any other Chromium-based browser -- Edge, Vivaldi, Brave, Opera -- preferably one that doesn't funnel everything back to Google?
I don't know about that. I'm not going to try. When I called the bank's webmaster to ask why all of a sudden Firefox was not working (Safari never did) I was told to use Chrome. I did not ask if any Chromium-based browser would do the job.
I know wha you mean. I have 1GB connection.
Does the uBlock origin extension that cuts out all the code load from ads and more help?
I don't have any M apples hardware yet, but funny you mention M1 speed. I noticed this too.
I just so happened to help out someone with a M1 MacBook air recently, a very nice piece of kit indeed, and I noticed the page load in Safari was more or less instant. Super impressive, as you describe.
I thought, wow I really need tp update my hardware.
This mac belonged to a non-power user, but a creative, the kind who doesn't have time to figure stuff out on computers, so little would have been done to the OS, it was running Sequoia and I was updating it to latest Seqouia while making sure it wasn't going to auto-update tho Tahoe.
IIRC the machine stilled seemed perfectly fine after that update. Next time I have access to it, I'll see if it's as impressively fast.
It seems to me these days they only dev and test for Chrome when it comes to Banks.
anytime i've had to do support with Banks, the first suggestion is invariably "Can you test it using chrome?", and I say, no.
Perhaps the devs co's have figured out they can wave the the security meltdown swords of Damocles, and dev as they like and charge a pretty penny, but all I can do is speculate as to why.
The problem is, there are some sites that won't work for Safari (or in my case Firefox) and I have Chrome for those situations. I can be all high and mighty and refuse their support and requests to try a different browser but at the end of the day, all that is doing is hurting me, and preventing me from getting what I need done.
Funny story, I support ERP at my company and there was an issue where safari was not working, the person needed to requisition supplies but they could not via Safari. It just kept erroring out. I told them to try to Chrome, they refused, and said it has to work with Safari. I told them that's not a supported browser and they have to use Chrome, and they refused.
I closed the ticket
Perhaps settings or caches? I have no issues with Safari, I rotate from that, Firefox and Chrome depending on the site and requirements.
Browsers rotate in being the most efficent or fastest. Not long ago, Chrome was a total memory hog, would become unresponsive for random types of content, and just bog down. At that time, Safari ran circles around it.
I keep Chrome on rotation, but (even on Android) it is not my daily driver.
Good browser, just like some features on other browsers a bit better.
Browsers rotate in being the most efficent or fastest. Not long ago, Chrome was a total memory hog, would become unresponsive for random types of content, and just bog down. At that time, Safari ran circles around it.
I keep Chrome on rotation, but (even on Android) it is not my daily driver.
Good browser, just like some features on other browsers a bit better.
I make the point so maybe it gets pushed through feedback, and eventually devs. I never hit issues that were impassible. Thankfully.
I suppose you example is company internal?
I'm thinking primarily in from a corporate an their customer facing operations, where "unsupported browser" is not particularly customer friendly or ok IMHO especially when it's one of the the main 4 or so browsers, but I'm not totally up on the state of play of browsers and what's going on at Apple with regards to Safari. but giving G browser dominance is not a good move for anyone.
Yep, I'm not logged in with chrome, its there just for compatibility
I don't think that how it works for many companies. Typically, at least with my company, a support ticket is generated and if a browser is found incompatible, we'll look to resolve it, but in this safari case, we recommend that they use chrome.
Since chrome is 71% marketshare, the fall back is to try to use chrome as a work around. if the caller who is reporting the issue refuses to do basic steps to identify and isolate the problem, then the ticket is closed and we move on.
I think companies try to maximize compatibility and dedicate resources to that the lowest common denominator - in this case Chrome.
Yea I accept that as a general rule. It makes sense.
I'm probably vibing off my most recent experience of Bank support, and now that I think about the circumstances more, it's perhaps explains my point better - it took a few days to resolve and spanned two week periods, the root casue was a seemingly prosaic app update.
IIRC essentially customers could not access their bank account, and in my case it spanned many days oand over a weekend, so I think the devs really screwed up, this my bias.
Do you know what, I also remember I did eventually try Chrome, but it made no difference. The support cheat sheet was useless in this instance and totally exhausted in my user case (older iOS probably not helping), and in the end, tenacity on my part and the luck of getting a lovely girl on support who got me to try something off sheet she had picked up from previous job and what dory know, it worked!
Curveball stuff.
Since the root cause came via app update,e that pointed to the dev company and I think my sense was they didn't really do robust testing, and may have just tested on Chrome and nothing else, maybe not even Chrome on iOS, hard to tell but they sure did collapse their clients Bank app nicely.
I know the call lines were rammed for days
