For the past month or two, Safari, the Mac OS X web browser, has been really slow on my desktop machine. I use a 1GHz G4 tower with 512MB of RAM, and there’s simply no reason why it should be slow. While using a webpage, the “spinning beachball” (like the hourglass on Windows) comes up for 10-20 seconds, even webpages without obnoxious things like Flash or Java. I got sick of it this evening, and started Googling around. Thankfully, I found out how to fix the problem.
Within the Safari Preferences, under the AutoFill tab, the “Other forms” function keeps a record of every non-login-and-password form that has ever been filled out in Safari. This gets to be a really huge list after awhile, and once I realized this, I also realized that the slowdowns had only been happening while completing forms. So, under “Edit,” I hit “Remove All,” and voila — Safari’s just like new.