Recently I have been experiencing increasingly worse performance with Safari
I regularly get the website is taking up too much memory report.
Sites are just freezing
Some sites just won’t load
None of these sites have the same problems in Chromium based browsers
Is there something I can check and twiddle with to improve performance?
On an M1 mac Mini with 16GB RAM
Thanks
I’ve not experienced all of those issues, but I have had sites freezing. I have to close and reopen Safari.
I’ve had no problems with Safari with two exceptions.
Perf problems for FB ads manager are silly. Any M series computer should have 0 problems with Javascript.
I’m happily running Safari as my primary browser without similar issues.
I’m on a MBP M1 with 16GB of RAM. I routinely get the “page is using too much memory” reports, when that shouldn’t be happening. It would make sense if I were visiting a page with a ridiculous number of ads, for example, but these are for the most part static pages with text and a few images.
I don’t have the page loading or freezing problem though.
I use Mac Safari for upwards of 9 hours a day (it’s my main work and play browser) and haven’t had any issues.
I do have rigorous ad and cookie blockers though (that’s not a browser issue, that’s a “the internet is full of junk that affects loading times” issue).
Only caveat as well is that I use Google and Facebook in Firefox so I can isolate them (and Wordle, but that’s because it doesn’t load right with all my privacy settings in Safari 
).
Which adblocker do you use?
Mine seems okish, though I have noticed some ‘weirdness’ and slow loading on a couple of sites.
I’ve noticed a bit of weirdness with Safari on the iPad. Mostly with older tabs that seem to get stuck when I return to them after a couple of days. Only solution is to copy the url and open a new tab to start again. It’s not happening often but I don’t ever recall it happening before.
Interestingly I have no problems on my iPhone or iPad. Strange that these things vary so much
Thanks all for your thoughts. Using Safari has now become so unbearable that I am pretty much moving to the Chromium browsers and experiencing non of the problems.
I think this is due to sites that are not tested on Safari causing infinite loops.
If I try and book a train on my national operator it always freezes and starts using lots of RAM, and this is with zero plugins installed. There is no fix, if I quit Safari and try again the exact same happens. Restarting the computer doesn’t make any difference. The site runs perfectly on Chrome.
It feels like Google is hijacking the web with their Chrome browser. An app written for a platform like Windows, Android, macOS, or iOS gets to call the shots. But if it is written for the web, it should not break on other browsers. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 tried the same trick and earned itself a considerable amount of hate.
I agree completely. I’d at least like the option to use Safari, and I probably would if it worked with all the sites I use as I like the interface.
On Mac Safari I’m running:
Ghostery no longer stops YouTube ads.
On iOS and iPad OS Safari I’m running:
One of them is still blocking YouTube ads - not sure which since they’re always running together. I don’t know why I’m running both, I have been for I think at least 7 years and I assume there was a reason originally.
I assume they all work since I rarely ever see ads on the web (not sure how else I’d be rating their service but if you have a question I will do my best to answer!).
The trick IMO was Microsoft bundling IE with Windows OS. The problem was website developers who were satisfied working with “only” 96% of the browsers in the world. Today Google Chrome has a 66% marketshare on the desktop, and Safari is second with 11.87%.
Chrome, like Safari, is based on open source software. And there are several other chromium browsers like Arc, Brave, and Microsoft Edge that adds to Chromium’s marketshare. But AFAIK there are no open source browsers based on webkit.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave. 
Safari, of course, was built on webkit. But Chrome arose from Blink which itself was a fork of webkit.
Have you tried clearing the cache?
Yes - I did but made no difference