Tag Archives: browser

Hardware solution to Safari 5 trouble. Really!

22 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Internet

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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?

A few words about Safari 5

10 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by in Internet, random

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I installed Safari 5 on my computer last night. The vast majority of things work just fine.
I can’t really say I’ve noticed much of an improvement in performance but then I haven’t put the browser through its paces yet, either.
One major change is the introduction of the Reader feature, which allows you to read stories on news websites without the clutter of menus and such.
Just click on the “Reader” button at the end of the menu bar …

ReaderButton

… and Safari will turn an article on a webpage from this …

ReaderBefore

… to this:

ReaderAfter

Just click on the “Reader” button again to turn the feature off.
Pretty neat trick, if I may say so — although I must admit advertisers and their representatives will probably have a different opinion on the matter.
One negative thing that did stick out, though, was behaviour reminiscent of Google’s Chrome when it first came out a few years ago.
The browser would intermittently be unable to resolve hosts and fail to display web pages.
It was eventually determined the trouble was its DNS prefetching feature, which you could turn off to solve the trouble.
Earlier today, Safari did something similar from time to time, too, although far less frequently than Chrome did.
And now that I am trying to replicate the failure, I can’t.
Oh well, I will share if it crops up again.
In any case, if anyone out there in cyberspace knows how to turn off DNS prefetching in Safari, lemme know. It might come in handy later!