Tuesday 22 November 2016

Mac Safari running slow / slow to start loading page?

My Mac Safari has been running slowly for a bit - it seems to take ages to start loading the page.

Firefox has no such problem - so I'm pretty sure my ISP is OK (I have fibre at approx 40Megs)

So, with thanks to http://www.webnots.com/fix-safari-slow-loading-pages-mac-os-x/ I found the following seems to have fixed my problem.

Disable the DNS Prefetching in Safari:
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defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean false

(You can re-enable it by doing:
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defaults delete com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled)

Simple as that - don't even need sudo! Just restart Safari and off you go.

(For info, MacBook Pro 15" running Sierra)

Tuesday 1 November 2016

Sorting eMail into folders? Why would you do that?

I picked this up from listening to 'More or Less' on BBC Radio 4 (podcasts are available here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrss1/episodes/downloads).

Since I got a large (multiple gigs) allocation of eMail space, my archiving/organising of email has effectively fallen to zero. I can search for people and subjects and grab the threads I need most of the time.

I get pushback on this approach from the 'Inbox Zero' brigade but it seems to work for me - after all, I don't organise my twitter or facebook feeds - I just let them scroll by - same with eMail - it'll be there when I need it.

Finally I have some support for my approach - and from IBM Research no less! MIT Technology review introduces and links to the research paper here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424056/stop-organizing-your-e-mail-says-study/

As with all things, your mileage may vary but at least I can feel less guilty about the '>999' message count on my mail icon . . :-)