Safari 6 very slow on MBA/MacBook Air.

Question

I have a MacBook Air which is less than a year old. Granted, it is only the 2gb but for most things it does well. However, running Safari -- especially the latest version 6 -- is painfully slow on this machine. The same version of Safari on my iMac at home does not seem to have the same issue (or at least not nearly to this degree). And I do not have this issue with Firefox or Chrome (Opera does seem to have a similar issue)
Has anyone else had this issue on their MBA? Is it simply a memory issue with Safari being such a memory hog that it needs more than 2gb physical ram to run? Or perhaps it is just a CPU hog? Or perhaps there is something else which I have overlooked that would make a difference? Any thought/suggetions, anyone? I'd really like to speed up Safari on this machine. Safari's ability to save live links when saving a webpage to PDF is unique and much too usefull to make abandoning Safari an option for me.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Take these steps when you notice the problem.
Step 1
Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the page that opens.
Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.
Select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.
Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.
Select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?
Next, select the Disk Activity tab. What approximate values are shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec?
Step 2
You must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.
Launch the Console application in the same way as above. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left.
Post the 50 or so most recent messages in the log — the text, please, not a screenshot.
Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Edit it out before posting.