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...
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:So the commands in the hint should work just fine without the -float.]
defaults write somedomain preferenceKey 500
defaults write somedomain preferenceKey -int 500
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050118152940322