Safari 5.0.6 still hangs half-way, often

Question

My OSX 10.5.8 dual G5 with Safari 5.0.6 still hangs half-way, often, when I click on URLs or bookmarks.
Strangely, when it does so, it seems to always hang with the blue progress bar in the same spot, almost exactly half-way up the URL address field.
If I stop the load and Reload Page, it always immediately gets the whole page loaded and shown.
Any ideas?
thanks

Answer 1

Thanks very much, Klaus1.
0. All of this hanging started suddenly after the last Apple System Security Update of a month or so ago. Perhaps 1/3 my *newly requested* pages hang during loading now, half-way through always, and going to a new tab and loading a different site will only hang 1/3 of the time, i.e. mostly opening a new tab and site is fine. Re-loading any page is always fine.
Your suggestions:
1. I clear cache and history, regularly, several times a day.
2. Using 8.8.4.4, 8.8.8.8 - Google Public DNS. I used to use OpenDNS but had trouble with it a few months back.
3. Not part of a network
4. It is only a year old, from Sky Broadband, and has served me very well until issue 0. above
5. Interesting... DNS pre-fetching: What is this and is it likely to cause pages to begin loading (AFTER DNS time) and then hang half-way through? I would think this problem is NOT my DNS settings, since the normal (short) DNS delay still occurs and the progress bar moves normally to half-way then hangs.
6. Flash: Yes, it's a total mess these days, bloated and very buggy. This sometimes causes an overall slow down, but not hanging for me.
7. I will try the "killall" next time a page hangs; will this fix that current hang, or do I need to reload. REMEMBER: reloading *always* unhangs the page load.
Thanks, but unless I missed something, non-obvious, none of these help.
Klaus1 wrote:
If Safari is getting very slow:
1. (Presumably you regularly empty your Safari cache by deleting the following file:
Home/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/cache.db
and clear your History)
Adding Open DNS codes to your Network Preferences, should give good results in terms of speed-up as well as added security:
2. If you are using a single computer: Open System Preferences/Network. Double click on your connection type, or select it in the drop-down menu, and in the box marked 'DNS Servers' add the following two numbers:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
(You can also enter them if you click on Advanced and then DNS)
Sometimes reversing the order of the DNS numbers can be beneficial in cases where there is a long delay before web pages start to load, and then suddenly load at normal speed:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2296
3. If your computer is part of a network:please refer to this page: http://www.opendns.com/start/best_practices/#your_network and follow the advice given.
4. If you use a Router, make sure it has the latest firmware installed.
5. One reason for a slowness in page loading may be the 'DNS Pre-fetching' feature of Safari 5.x as is described here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3408?viewlocale=en_US
You can cancel DNS pre-fetching by going to Terminal and typing:
defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean false
You have to restart Safari for it to take effect.
6. If Safari seems to hang for ages:
If you have a lot of tabs open and/or a lot of pages running Flash, Safari can sometimes 'hang', requiring a restart of Safari. This can often be inconvenient, and as it is rarely Safari itself that is hanging but merely one of its plug-ins, usually Flash, there is a way using Terminal to restart the plug-ins (without restarting Safari and losing your tabs) by quitting the WebPluginHost process:
Open the Terminal from the Utilities folder in /Applications and type
killall -9 WebKitPluginHost
Note that this command kills all Safari plug-ins, not just Flash. All plug-ins should start back up when you reload the page.
Then go back to Safari and refresh any pages that were using the Flash plug-in. This also fixes the Beachball of Death. Try this whenever Safari gets slow or freezes. The latest versions of Flash 10.1 appear to have improved the situation somewhat, but haven't completed eliminated it.
For this and other reasons Apple switched their websites to HTML5 in January 2011:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/26/apple_revamps_its_public_website_u sing_html5.html