Make Safari update as it downloads a page

Jan 24, '05 09:43:00AM

Contributed by: hagbard

There was already a great hint on how to reduce the time required before the first update was shown on screen while opening a web page in Safari. I just found out that you can make Safari update your screen while resources (i.e. pictures, long text, etc.) get downloaded. If, for example, you load a page that has lots of graphics, you'll see it update much more often. This indeed creates a real impression of speed. I decided to submit this as a new hint because, on fast machines at least, it does really improve on the previous technique. Here's how to do it:

Quit safari, then, in the Terminal, enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitResourceTimedLayoutDelay 0.0001
Make sure you also implement the previous hint; for sake of convenience, the command in that hint was:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25
Warning: If you don't have a fast machine, you may want to increase the numbers, instead of 0.0001, try 0.05, 0.1, 0.25 or 0.5...

[robg adds: There was some discussion in the comments to the original hint regarding the exact format of the defaults write command and whether you needed the -float flag. The man page for defaults seems to state that you do not:
For the basic plist types (strings, data, ints, floats, booleans, and dates) it is not necessary to precede the value with a type qualifier. For example, the following commands are equivalent:
defaults write somedomain preferenceKey 500
defaults write somedomain preferenceKey -int 500
So the commands in the hint should work just fine without the -float.]

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050118152940322