What the Heck is Wrong with Safari?

Okay, here’s the deal:

I routinely read a dozen or more political blogs several times a day. I have them all in a Bookmarks Bar folder and open them in tabs for easy viewing. As I finish one, I collapse the tab by clicking on the close icon. This allows me to leave the cursor placed over the close icon and rapidly cycle through the sites (checking for updates) by simply hitting the trackpad button.

I’ve been reading blogs this way for a long time with no problems, even for some time after upgrading to Leopard. But lately everything has gone to wrack and ruin…

Now — and very consistently — whenever I try to close the first tab in a sequence, Safari simply hangs up and will not respond, and I have to force-quit. Sometimes the browser works normally if I close the first tab quickly, before the page loads, and move on to the next tab, but usually this doesn’t work, either. I’ve changed the order of the tabbed blog sites, even deleted some of them, but this still happens, and it happens with some sites now regardless of where they are in the sequence. For some of these sites — which have never given me trouble before — the hang-up occurs when visiting them individually, i.e. no tabs.

This is a huge pain, to put it mildly. Since many of the blogs I visit routinely post various kinds of videos (not just YouTube versions), I suspect the problem may have to do with Adobe Flash support. There are now many different kinds of embedded videos, and my intuition is that these new kids on the block are making things difficult.

Most political bloggers are NOT all that Web-savvy, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re unintentionally screwing up their sites by routinely slapping up these videos. I have no way to tell, however, other than the fact that Safari don’t work no mo’.

No, I haven’t googled for a solution yet. But the problem is very prevalent. If you’re having the same experience, know that you’re not alone!