Hi Rafael, Dan, and Others,
On the subject of Safari freezes related to PDF files,
Dan Keys wrote:
One of the recent things I did with Onyx, a free system
maintenance utility, was this. From within Onyx, I set Safari to
download .pdf files, instead of opening them in the browser. This
avoids the freezing up of Safari. And the .pdf file is available to
read, from where ever your downloads are located.
And Rafael Bejarano further described forcing PDF files to download:
I work around safari's freezing problem as follows:
1. Place the mouse cursor on the pdf file's link and turn off
VoiceOver.
2. click once with the mouse button to download the pdf file, being
careful not to move the mouse.
3. Press command-S to save.
4. turn VoiceOver back on so that you can navigate the save dialog
(i.e., name the file, move to the folder where you want to save it,
etc.).
5. After moving the cursor to the save button, turn VoiceOver off a
second time, and click on the save button with the mouse.
I know this is cumbersome, but it does avoide the freezing problem.
There are at least two things going on with Safari freezes due to
displaying PDF files in your browser.
1. If PDF files are really large, say bigger than 4MB, the web browser
may time out before it finishes downloading for display.
2. If the PDF file uses lots of fonts that are enabled on your system,
when it tries to render your page in the browser it may spend lots
of time
looking up the correct fonts. This is generally more of a problem
with PDFs prepared for Adobe Reader and the Acrobat plug-in.
Most problems with "Safari, busy" and slowdowns or freezes have to
do with large caches that take up lots of memory. This can be related
to how certain browser plug-ins perform, too. I'd forgotten that Onyx,
in addition to being useful for clearing caches, can also be used to
change the default preferences to download rather than display
PDF files in your browser. In addition, you can option-click on
web links
to files to force download instead of display. Use command-option+L
to bring up the downloads window and interact first to find different
"groups" of downloads ("interact with list group") and arrow down
to the latest download, then interact again ("interact with group") to
"parse" the group information in to filename, size, and location
in finder.
Pressing (VO-keys+space) the "show in finder" button takes you to
the directory of the downloaded file in finder. (You can set the
default download location in your Safari preferences, so this doesn't
have to be your Desktop).
I haven't tried out Slau's suggestion of QucikAccessCM to move files
around the Mac, but that might be a convenient way to go.
http://free.abracode.com/cmworkshop/quick_access.html
Some other general suggestions: avoid using dashboard widgets.
These continue to use memory even when you don't use them. Clear
caches periodically. If you don't use a utility like Onyx or
Cocktail,
you can use the "Empty cache" option under the Safari menu (or
its keyboard shortcut, command+option+e), Then stop and restart
Safari.
You can also clear out the ~/Library/Safari/Icons folder. These
"favicons"
are small image icons that some web pages display beside the page
name,
in the address bar and they slow loading. From the April 16, 2007
MacFixIt
page on "Speeding up Safari":
Clear favicons Favicons, in addition to causing slow launching (as
aforementioned in Slow Launching) can significant delays in loading
pages. Drag the folder:
~/Library/Safari/Icons
to the trash and and relaunch Safari for a potentially significant
speed
improvement.
If you find that routinely deleting the contents of this folder is
a drag, and
you don't care to display favicons at all, you can permanently disable
their storage. First clear the contents of the aforementioned
folder, then
do one of the following:
1. Lock the ~/Library/Safari/Icons folder by navigating to ~/
Library/Safari/,
clicking the Icons folder, then selecting Get Info from the File menu.
Check the Locked box under General.
2. Change permissions for the ~/Library/Safari/Icons folder by
navigating
to ~/Library/Safari/, clicking the Icons folder, then selecting Get
Info from
the File menu. Under Ownership & Permissions change the "You can"
setting to Read Only.
3. Drag the ~/Library/Safari/Icons folder to the trash, then create
a new
blank text file in TextEdit or another application, name it "Icons"
and
drag it to the ~/Library/Safari/ folder, in effect blocking Safari
from writing
anything to that location.
Greg gave instructions some time ago on how to turn on the debug
menu in SafarI: (this was in the context of changing your default
agent to access web sites that checked for a Window MSIE browser)
<begin quote>
Activating the debug menu:
If open, close Safari
Open the terminal and run the following command:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Open Safari, the last menu will be Debug
<end quote>
If you have Safari's Debug menu enabled, you can arrow down to the
"Show Caches Window". Use item chooser (VO-keys+i)
to display all the buttons and select in turn "Garbage Collect
Javascript Objects" then "Empty WebCore Caches".
This will clear Safari's JavaScript cache.
If you're seeing marginal performance, you can quit applications t
hat you're not using - remember, unlike Windows you
don't stop running the app when you close its window (command+w)
but only when you quit (command+q). Also, in some cases specific
browser plug-ins may be associated with performance problems.
Just my thoughts. YMMV.
Esther
