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I run a two year old basic 2Ghz Intel Macbook with 10.6.4 installed and I've been noticing a fair amount of browser lag over the last month or two.
By lag I mean quite often (at least once or twice every 10 minutes of use) the spinning ball comes up when I attempt to switch tabs in either Safari or Firefox (both are up to date). This lag can happen for 5-30 seconds. It also occurs quite often when switching programmes or trying to close programmes. I've tried to just run one programme at a time, but that hasn't seemed to make any difference as to the frequency or length of the lag. I have also noticed that it isn't just confined to loading pages that are heavy on photos or videos. Just tabbing between various forums seems to do the trick sometimes
I've had a look at the hard drive using the Disk Utility but everything seems to be running ok. I have about 25% of the hard drive space free.
Any suggestions as to what this might be or how I might resolve it?
I run into the same problem with a similar, older macbook. I'll have 6 or 7 tabs open in firefox, go to play a youtube clip, close a tab and the spinning beachball will lag me for up to a minute. When it starts beachballing, I think firefox is going wild with memory hogging. I'll quit firefox, and sometimes the dock won't indicate that firefox has stopped running for a good 3-4 minutes. When quitting, I have it save my open tabs, and I think it does that right away. If firefox is lingering in the dock, I'll force quit it and restart it with all my tabs from the previous session. I've gotten used to this fix, although it's a pain. I've never had firefox forget my tabs, for which I am grateful...
Yeah i've noticed this cropping up in the last few months too, and if it spins too long the browser also crashes. I figured it was just my machine getting old
How often do you quit the browser? They need to be restarted every now and then, you know.
Open Activity Monitor and see how much memory/CPU the offending browser is using.
safari is never using a ton right before a crash, and i do restart mine every once and awhile. Sometimes the CPU spikes when flash decides to crash safari, but safari crashes on its own sometimes without flash's help
And maybe it is just flash. (Depending what site you are visiting). I would suggest to upgrade to the latest version, if possible. The latest version of flash should add some performance improvements as well. If you use noscript addon for Firefox or the Klicktoflash plugin for safari you can disable all flash content (until you click the element you want to view).
I'm going to try Chrome for a week and I've updated my Onyx version and run the tools. I'll consider updating Flash if the above doesn't show much improvement. I will say Chome is amazingly fast compared to Safari/FF - although 10 minutes use isn't really a lot to go on I guess
I'm running a 2 month old core i5 MacBook Pro, and I've had none of those said issues. However, before this one, I had a 5 year old G4 PowerBook with 1 gig of RAM. While Flash wasn't exactly ideal under it, I never experienced the slowdown you guys are describing.
Also, run disk utility, select your hard drive, and hit verify disk. It might turn up an error asking you to boot off your OS X installation disk, and from there, you can repair your hard drive.
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Open up your disk utility, highlight your partition, and then click "Repair File Permissions." See if that helps any.
Delete the Caches folders (/Library/Caches, /System/Library/Caches/, and /Users/<username>/Library/Caches/)
See what happens in Safe Mode (hold shift as you turn on the computer and keep holding it until the Apple logo appears on the screen).
Open Activity Monitor and see how much memory/CPU the offending browser is using.
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safari is never using a ton right before a crash, and i do restart mine every once and awhile. Sometimes the CPU spikes when flash decides to crash safari, but safari crashes on its own sometimes without flash's help
somehow i doubt this
I'll try the other ideas suggested
Thanks again
Download Onyx and run all the diagnostic and cleanup tools.
C) Switch over to Chrome, the Mac version recently came out of beta and it's blinding fast.
D) How much RAM do you have?
E) Try out the Flash Player 10.1 pre-release and see if that boosts performance, it certainly did for me.
I'm going to try Chrome for a week and I've updated my Onyx version and run the tools. I'll consider updating Flash if the above doesn't show much improvement. I will say Chome is amazingly fast compared to Safari/FF - although 10 minutes use isn't really a lot to go on I guess
Flash literally kills this thing
Sorry, forgot to answer this.
I run 1gb of ram.
My housemate who has a 9 month old top of the line MacBook Pro has had similar issues with Safari and Firefox
Also, run disk utility, select your hard drive, and hit verify disk. It might turn up an error asking you to boot off your OS X installation disk, and from there, you can repair your hard drive.