Got a late 2009 iMac with 10.6.6 on it. Have Safari 5.03 on it -- with problems just recently appearing (during the past two days).

What's the problems?

Lots of websites load quickly and normally in Safari. But:

-- Some websites do not load after five minutes (I'm impatient and so never wait longer) -- and Activity under Safari's Window menu shows that there is only a partial loading in such cases -- say 65 of 74 items have loaded.

-- Sometimes the website loads (quickly or shortly after my resetting the blue colouring over the URL address and hitting Return again) -- but with the cog wheel spinning for five minutes after the loading. Here Safari Activity again shows only a partial loading. In this case, I can use some links on the web page downloaded and the back button works -- not for other links where no page emerges or a page does emerge but the back button does not then work.

FireFox, however, works properly all the time. But I'd like to stay with Safari

So what have I done? I downloaded the new update for Safaria -- 5.04. No good. I used DU to verify the disk and to repair permissions. No seemingly relevant problems reported. I Reset Safari, checking all the boxes. No good. I removed the Safari plist from my Home Library Preferences. No good. I downloaded a new Safari from the Apple site and installed it. No good. I used Diskwarrior from my external drive to repair the volume with Safari on it. No Good.

I have the impression that the trouble hails from pictures/videos that are not coming through with Safari but that do with FireFox. And that's because sometimes when the Safari websites load (but not fully according to Activity), it's a picture/video that shows up as a blank But I'm not very confident of this suggestion.

You will want a website example of my problem -- it won't likely be yours. But anyway, here is a baddie of mine -- my hometown newspaper: winnipegfreepress.com

Hope somebody has had this problem before and was able to cure it without major surgery.

Hmmm... winnipegfreepress.com just loaded instantly and completely in my Safari 5.0.4.

How about trying to log in to a test user account to see what happens there?

You can also try starting up in Safe Mode. (What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode?)

Following Artie's suggestion: If the problem is absent when you log into a test account, go back into your regular account and empty the Safari cache (you can do this from the Safari menu). If that doesn't work, delete the cookies from the problem site(s). You can do this by going to Safari > Preferences > Security and then clicking the Show Cookies button. I don't know if it is necessary to quit and relaunch Safari after each step but it wouldn't hurt.

Trouble with that, Jon, is that RHV has already "[I] Reset Safari, checking all the boxes."

I'm not all that certain that my suggested steps do much, if any, more.

Oops! It was early in the morning and I missed that.

RHV-

Have you installed PithHelmet, AdBlock, Safari Extensions, Haxies, or the like?

I'm just wondering if one of those might be culprit.

open terminal and type

cat /etc/resolv.conf

and paste us what you get. also have you installed anything that messes with your network, such as parallels or an AV software?

Thanks to all who replied.

After two days, the problem has vanished.

On my 10.6.6 OS that command results in the following:


(that's my internal IP address for the LAN's router / DNS)

This leads me to wonder if his problem doesn't lie with the ISP NameServer instead.......perhaps an addition of 4.2.2.2 to his network PrefPane might be in order as a test?

the reason I was recommending resolv.conf is it's the shortest way to tell if your dns has been hijacked by malware

I think the new way is this:

scutil --dns

...and then scroll up to the "resolver #1" listing. (or pipe it into sed '3,6!d' perhaps)

Note however that: the resolver #1 listing is giving identical results to the cat /etc/resolv.conf method on my Mac at the moment (along with the aforementioned 'not used' comments).

:shrug: