Apple Safari is a powerful and secure browser that comes standard on all Apple products. With Internet speeds continually increasing, it’s easy to get frustrated when your browser starts running slow. While Safari is a powerful browser, it isn’t the fastest and can get bogged down easily. When this happens it’s important to keep a few tricks up your sleeve to get your speed back.
Here are 5 ways to help boost the speed of Safari:
Clear Your History and Cache
The data Safari stores takes up a great deal of memory and often contributes to slowing things down. Luckily, clearing your history and cache is an easy project that can make a big difference. Here’s how to clear out this data:
Open Safari
Select the History menu
Choose Clear History
Set your time span
Hit Clear History
You can automate this process by using CleanMyMac’s Smart cleanup tool. This will automatically clear your Safari history and cache and other application data as well to keep things running at top speed.
Extension Bugs
Extensions can help improve your browsing experience by saving your passwords, checking your grammar or translating words. Unfortunately they can often be buggy because they are third-party add-ons and aren’t always regularly updated. You need to remove the buggy extension, but first you need to find out which one is causing trouble. Here’s how:
Open the Safari menu
Click Preferences
Open the Extensions tab
Uncheck extensions one by one to see if the problem goes away
When you find the extension causing problems, simply remove it from Safari.
Autofill Backlog
The autofill feature of a browser makes navigating the internet much faster, until it starts to slow down your browser. Safari autofill can store your address, credit card info and much more, but if you don’t keep it cleaned out it can start to bog down your browsing experience. Here’s how to clean out your autofill data:
Open the Safari menu
Click Preferences
Select the Autofill tab
Click edit next to each setting
Decide information you want Safari to fill for you
Safari’s autofill settings are customizable and in the preferences you are able to select or disable autofill uses. You will see all the data stored for autofill when you select Edit for each category.
Outdated Plugins
While outdated, some websites still require Flash and java to play video or animated content. These plugins may be the cause of Safari’s slow speed. If you frequent websites that require Flash and Java and aren’t able to remove these plugins, check to see if they need updating.
Visit the Adobe’s website to find the latest version of Flash. This page will identify the version you are running and tell you if you need to update it.
For Java, visit Oracle’s website. Here you will be able to confirm the version of Java you are running and receive instructions if it’s time to update.
Start Again
Sometimes despite your best cleaning efforts, Safari still isn’t running at the speed you need. If this is the case, it may be time to give Safari a full reset and get a fresh start. This will remove all of your customizations, so hopefully it doesn’t come to this. If you feel this is what your browser needs, here’s how to do it:
Clear your browsing history
Disable all extensions
Open Safari menu
Select Preferences
Open Extensions tab
Select all extensions
Click Uninstall
Delete all plugins
Open Safari menu
Select Preferences
Open Security tab
Deselect Allow Plugins
Getting Safari back to it’s original glory is a multistep process ever since the introduction of OS X Yosemite. These few simple steps may sound repetitive from above. However, when done all at once they will restore Safari to factory settings and hopefully get you back to top speed.
If you are still experiencing speed issues with Safari there may be other problems. Give us a call or bring your computer by today to get a diagnosis.
