Tags
airport extreme, apple, browser, bug, chrome, DNS, fix, mac, prefetch, prefetching, router, safari, trouble
This whole Safari trouble got me surveying some people around me who use Macs and had upgraded to Safari 5.
My best bud, who has a late-model Airport Extreme, has had no trouble whatsoever. Another fella, who has a router as old as mine, was having the same trouble as I was. On the Internet, posts from Mac help forums users suggested people with no trouble possessed newer-model routers.
While skeptical about this Safari trouble being fixable by hardware, I figured I would sink some money on a new router. (I was going to do it anyhow.)
Lo and behold … all my troubles are gone.
And as a side bonus, I can better wireless throughput and can now print through my router. Just waiting to add a large network drive to back up my data.
But that’s not the point.
Not everyone can go and splurge on a new router just because Apple decided to upgrade their Web browser. Surely there is some software fix for whatever hardware trouble people are encountering.
This brings me back to my original hunch: Someone at Apple needs to add a check box to disable DNS prefetching. My gut tells me that’s been the problem all along. That’s how I “fixed” Chrome when its DNS prefetch feature continually caused my Internet connection to time out.
But is anybody at Apple listening?
Ricky Leong 
I think their is some problem with Safari on the iPad too. Which may explain some of the WiFi drops. I for one am tired of Apple which seems to expect everyone to use all Apple products from routers to computers in order to get a good result. They love to blame third party routers for what causes problems with their computers and other WiFi hardware. I for one think they should work and be tested to work on most recent Routers no matter who made them.
I found this post because I’ve been searching around for a solution to why Safari is causing my wifi to grind to a halt. I know it’s Safari because I’m not seeing the same behavior with Chrome, even though that does DNS prefetching too. There’s something very odd about these changes in Safari – it’s causing my Mac to spew DNS lookups for ‘local’ several times a second and is causing everything else to grind to a halt. I’ve decided to ditch Safari for the time being until it gets fixed.
I don’t blame you. Apple lack of a response is irksome, too. I have a feeling that because the problem can’t be replicated in their lab, they believe it must not really exist.