Tabs in Safari 5.1/Lion

Question

Just installed Lion today, so not sure if this is a Sarafi or Lion thing, but working with tabs is now terrible.
- Most times they dont seem to load content when not in the foreground; for instance if I hit a link to open in a new tab and then go back to the initial tab, if I go back later to the new tab it hasn't loaded yet.
- Closing tabs takes way too long, like there's a 5 second delay.
- Switching to another tab I've often found it blank, and then it reloads.
- Clicking on a link to open it in a new tab doesn't put the new tab at the end like it used to. It appears to be trying to stick it close to the originating tab but not always.
Plus I just noticed that Safari is not auto-correcting or checking my spelling here...

Answer 1

How much memory do you have in your machine? Your performance complaints smell of memory problems - not that you're out of memory, per se., but because Safari does a few different things when memory is low.
For example, your problem closing tabs could be because the idle tabs have been paged out and need to be paged back in before they can be cleared (as silly as that may sound). As forthe tabs opening blank... Safari may defer the loading of a page and, as such, the tab is really just a placeholder for the link you want to open. In some respects this makes sense - no point in wasting CPU cycles and memory rendering a page you may never view, so check your memory configuration.
As for the tab ordering, the logic is that each tab you open is somehow associated with the 'parent' page, so it makes a certain amount of sense for the tab to open somewhere close to its parent. This is especially apparent if you open two tabs - say google searches for 'Apple' and 'Orange', then on each of the search result pages, open a couple of links in new tabs.
What you'll see is that all the 'Apple' tabs are grouped together, as are the 'Orange' tabs. A subtle difference, for sure, but that's the difference. It's also consistent with other browsers (e.g. Chrome).