Slow Web Page Loading in Safari & Firefox

Question

A few months ago, Safari began loading web pages extremely slowly, regardless of the Internet connection. I don’t recall doing anything special at the time; it just kind of started all of a sudden. I thought it might a problem with Safari, so I downloaded Firefox. Although Firefox was a bit faster at first, it quickly (over the course of about 1 week) slowed down as well. To reiterate, the browser application itself was loading quite rapidly, yet the web pages were taking a very long time. On average, it takes more than 90 seconds to load a web page as simple as Google.com. Before this problem began, a web page would usually take an average of about 15-20 seconds to load. I am sure that it is NOT due to my Internet connection because the problem remains regardless of whether I am at home (where I have a cable connection) or at work (where I know the Internet connection is very reliable). To further support this, my roommate who has a 4 year old Dell PC loads web pages using Internet Explorer significantly faster than I do (with my 2.5 year old MacBook Pro). I have not noticed any kind of performance decrease with any of my other software or hardware; the computer still starts-up quickly, and all of my other software applications are very responsive. Any suggestions on how I might fix this issue?

Answer 1

Before this problem began, a web page would usually take an average of about 15-20 seconds to load
I would call that slow! 1-5 seconds should be the maximum.
The following usually works on both Tiger and Leopard:
(First, if yours is an Intel Mac, check that Safari is not running in Rosetta, which is enough to slow it to a crawl.)
Adding DNS codes to your Network Settings, should gives good results in terms of speed-up:
Open System Preferences/Network. Double click on your connection type, or select it in the drop-down menu. Click on TCP/IP and in the box marked 'DNS Servers' enter the following two numbers:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
(An explanation of why that is both safe and a good idea can be read here: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/opendsn-what-is-opendns-why-required-2/2587 / )
Whilst in System Preferences/Network you should also turn off 'IPv6' in your preference pane, as otherwise you may not get the full speed benefit (the DNS resolver will default to making SRV queries). If you want to know what IPv6 is:
This is Apple's guidance on iPv6:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8708.html
Click on Apply Now and close the window.
Restart Safari, and repair permissions.
If that didn't do it, then try this as well:
Empty Safari's cache (from the Safari menu), then close Safari.
Go to Home/Library/Safari and delete the following files:
form values
download.plist
Then go to Home/Library/Preferences and delete
com.apple.Safari.plist
Repair permissions (in Disk Utility).
Start up Safari again, and things should have improved.