Slow internet browsing with Safari

Software
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21

I connected my iPhone to my Mac today to analyse what is happening when pages are flow/fail to load.

The main culprits seem to be slow loading of typekit.net, fonts.gstatic.com and code.jquery.com and similar. Badly coded websites often ‘hang’ if the fonts aren’t loaded instead of loading with default fonts then going to fetch the ‘better’ fonts.

This explains why subsequent loads of the site are fine - if you’re prepared to wait 10-20 seconds for fonts.gstatic.com to download its fonts, they’ll be cached in the browser for a number of hours so won’t need to be redownloaded.

Why this is happening, I’ve no real idea, except that these font/cdn services could be used as third party trackers, so it’s possible that Apple is doing something to protect privacy and, in doing so, making the sites slow to load. Certainly, it doesn’t happen (often) on Chrome, which makes me think it’s not my ISP, the iPhone or the remote website that’s the problem. Strangely, though, the hangs seem to occur whether I have the relevant options set in settings or not.

3 Likes
22

I think I’ve got to the bottom of this.

Apple’s Hide IP from Trackers feature uses their private relay servers. On my local network parental controls are turned on and - to prevent them being circumvented - those network controls also block the servers used for private relay.

It seems to be that this causes some sites to hang. They try to load the font, Safari tries to redirect the load via Apple’s servers, it can’t connect and it all just seems to hang for up to 20 seconds.

I don’t need this feature as I block trackers via a content blocker in Safari anyway, so turning it off will hopefully resolve the issue. Turns out I really like Safari on iOS!