What’s going on with Safari 15.4 (latest) on macOS Monterey 12.3.1???
I clear the history multiple times a day. But, it’s been slow for the last few days, maybe after the upgrade to 12.3.1.
I’m on a Mac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020), 3.6 GHz 10-Core Intel Core i9, 64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4.
I was seeing slow load times on Safari 15.4 (2019 MBAir, MacOS 12.3.1) so I checked the extensions I was using. It turns out two of the Malwarebytes Browser Guard extensions (PUP Blocker and/or Scam Blocker) seemed to be causing the problem. I enabled the other three MB extensions one a time (Browser Guard, BG Ad & Tracker Blocker, BG Malware Blocker) and they had no effect on load times. Web pages now load just as fast with or without them enabled. I’m not seeing any Safari slowdown. If you have extensions enabled try turning them all off then testing them one at a time.
Thanks for the reply! I don’t have any extensions other that 1Password, that is active, and Step Two and Webex which are inactive.
Safari is loading much quicker today. No changes since yesterday. I don’t know why!?!?!
Without a particular metric to measure against I can’t say I’ve ever had major issues with Safari - meaning I’ve never consciously thought it was very slow. I do run an ad blocker so perhaps that helps by not loading all sorts of animated and static advertising.
I don’t use Chrome at all. I installed it once several years ago and was staggered by the amount of extra baggage it installed. I’m also aware of some issues people have had with the auto-update function, and it seems perpetually vulnerable to exploits. I lean towards the ‘Google is evil’ camp so prefer to have nothing from them installed. If I absolutely needed Chrome I’d use a variant like Chromium or Brave.
Like you, ever since Safari 15.4 I’ve had intermittent issues with pages loading very slowly (10 seconds or more) that normally would load in under a second (and still do when using Firefox). My only enabled extension is 1Password. I believe I see it most often when there is some site tracking going open via appended strings to a URL (for instance, clicking on a link in an email often ends up appending an urchin tracking module ("&UTM") string to the URL; thanks, Google/Alphabet). I suspect it’s related to some of Safari’s new anti-tracking features, but haven’t figured out exactly what yet. But it’s been annoying enough that I switched my default browser to Firefox.
Thanks, trilo! I keep Chrome on for my wife’s work. But, I use Safari exclusively.
Thank you, John, for this advice. Safari’s slowness happened when clicking on site links directly also. It was slow for a while today, but is quicker now. I’ll reinstall Firefox again for backup. Don’t think that I’ve had it on this machine yet, as I use Safari exclusively.