Are my frequent Safari beach balls caused by my extensions?

Question

Every 2-10 minutes Safari pauses with a spinning beach ball for roughly 10-90 seconds, sometimes asking if I want to reload everything, making Safari almost unusable.

I've installed several safari extensions that mess with pages to prevent cross site attacks, scripting, cookies, etc. In particular, my active extensions are : AdBlock, ClickToFlash, Ghostery, JavaScript Blocker, and JavaScript BlackList. Anyone experienced conflicts amongst these before?

Additionally, I've installed but disabled Disconnect, NinjaKit, and WasteNoTime, but presumably disabled extensions cannot contribute to the problem.

I'll experiment with disabling these active scripts piecemeal, starting with JavaScript BlackList, who's role is presumably superseded by Ghostery and JavaScript Blocker.

I'm especially curious about whether Ghostery and JavaScript Blocker might be conflicting, given that they do very similar page editing. I prefer JavaScript Blocker for being infinitely more aggressive than Ghostery, but Ghostery has a better curated block list, which helps me allow stuff through JavaScript Blocker.

Answer 1

I'd say it's definitely possible, if not likely.

For starters, turn off extensions altogether, to verify that they're causing the issues. Then I'd suggest disabling them one at a time (which sounds like you've tried partly), until you can isolate which one is causing the issues.

If that doesn't help (but all extensions off does), then try only one of your Javascript blockers at once, in the event that some conflict between them is causing problems.

Answer 2

I've found that Chrome avoids this performance pitfall of Safari, well I needed one browsers with security extensions working while temporarily disabling extensions in Safari.

I suspect that Chrome performs better because Chrome sandboxes each tab separately. There are arguments that Chrome's V8 JS engine provides more stability anyways, in particular V8 is commonly used in server side JS, but whatever.

In any case, all this careful sandboxing makes Chrome much more secure than Safari in the first place, so anyone with these concerns should simply run Chrome.

At present, I found weak evidence that disabling all extensions fixes this problem, but disabling any individual extensions does not. I therefore suspect that Safari does not fully disabled extensions when individually disabling them, perhaps an extension I never enable causes the problem.

Also, I've weak evidence that Chrome loads pages slightly slower than Safari, not sure if that's the sandboxing and/or my extensions, but any such tiny page load hit is nothing compared to Safari's frequent paralyzing long freezes.