Prob a dummy question: Why is Safari so slow?

Software
1

This is probably the most straightforward question that I am almost embarrassed to ask. I’ve looked around the web, and can’t really get a straight answer.

Why is Safari so slow?

I read all over that Safari is faster and has better battery usage (don’t really care about the latter).

I am running an M4 Pro w/ 48GB RAM, and it seems like pages render slower, videos load lower (CNN, ESPN, etc.), Google Docs loads slower, etc. There seems like a lag from the time I submit a page until it starts rendering.

I am battling between Safari and Brave, and it seems like, in most use cases, Brave is faster. But I am trying to stay native, partially for privacy, and partially because of the integration with the rest of the OS and with Safari on iOS.

I run very few extensions: Wipr, Grammarly, 1Password, and DayOne. I have very few tabs open.

Is this normal? Any ideas? Or just educate me.

TIA, all. Thank you.

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This might not be the issue, but if it’s page rendering that’s slow, it might be iCloud Private Relay. Do you by chance have that turned on?

If so, try switching it off briefly and see if that solves the issue with speeding up loading times.

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You don’t say what your OS is, but I found that macOS Tahoe 26.0 & 26.1 made my Safari very slow too. The update that came out today seems to have greatly increased the speed. Just a FYI

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Hey, extensions may cause the issue, are you using updated version of Safari? You can also analyse the activity monitor and see how much resources is Safari taking.

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I don’t have a VPN or private relay on. Thank you though.

I am using 26.1. Will try the new update.

Will also no extensions and see.

I just didn’t know if it was some architectural thing with safari.

Thanks.

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You mentioned Google Docs. I have Chrome installed for this reason. I find Google Docs works better in Chrome. I use Safari for everything else.

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Hey, I have found a guide on this issue, follow this, it may help you. There are a lot more scenarios apart from the extensions that can slow the speed of safari for example - your OS version, website data, cache, history etc.

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I only have issues with Google Workspace apps, as others have noted. I also use Chrome for these websites.

Otherwise, I find Safari faster than Chromium based browsers. Before I switched to Apple Passwords I also had some issues with the 1Password extension, especially when using Profiles. I would also recommend trying disabling all the extensions then enabling them one by one and see the results.

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Conclusion: The biggest killer of the load times was both Wipr and Ublock Origin Lite. It makes sense, but I didn’t think the impact would be that bad. I tried them separately. Thanks for all the feedback, people.

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Try wBlock.

Personally, I use AdGuard. It works system-wide in all apps.

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You really need to trust the company to do that.

For this to work, AdGuard installs a CA certificate, so that they can inspect all HTTPS traffic on your computer (it acts as a MITM).

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MITM happens locally, not on AdGuard’s servers. Traffic isn’t routed through AdGuard’s infrastructure for inspection.

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I use 1Blocker, which is an alternative adblocker, and this doesn’t impact the performance, at least in my experience.

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True, but AdGuard calls home (to update rules), so you still have to trust the company (to not upload locally decrypted content).

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I find this to be a common pitfall. It’s so easy to install Safari Content Blockers that adding several of them one of top of another makes really no significant difference but the work to be done by them accumulates.

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Hey Ryan, I was having this issue as well a couple of months ago, and it appeared to be that I had some Electron apps that were potentially causing the issue. Here’s a link explaining the issue, and I used this tool to detect which apps were causing the problem.

I can’t say definitively that this was the only issue, but I don’t seem to have had any Safari slowdowns since around the time that I looked into the issue with Electron.