Cached 'favicons' in Safari can cause slowdowns
Mar 29, '04 10:38:00AM • Contributed by: kkrista
Anyone else notice that Safari has been getting slower and slower over time? In my case the most striking example was that I became unable to open a page in a new tab without getting a beach ball until it finished loading. This was happening on 2 machines since I upgraded to Panther (both clean installs) and I even got so frustrated I completely reinstalled Panther on one of the machines. It appears that Safari's declining performance isn't attributable to poor engine performance, so much as a lack of proper garbage collection.
Over time, Safari stores more and more info in your user's Library/Safari folder. Even though you can "reset" Safari, this doesn't clean up everything. In my case, the offending garbage was the "Icons" folder that stores every favicon you have ever come across. I manually deleted this folder, which removed hundreds of files and folders from my machine and Safari. Once they were trashed, Safari was back to it's old speedy self.
It would be nice if Apple could add some garbage collection to clean this up, but until then you can manually delete it or write an AppleScript to do it for you.
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