Removing the beachball from Safari

by Volker Weber

Safari was building up Windows-like behaviour on both Lucy and Snoopy. Whenever I clicked a few links to be opened in the background, Safari would switch on the beachball (for Windows-users: the hourglass). This was however completely resolved once I deleted the 20 meg Safari cache in the library folder:

~/Library/Caches/Safari

Everything is back to normal. Have you had similar experiences?

Comments

Yup. Same here. And just in case you don't want to delete that stuff manually all the time: Open a terminal window and execute "crontab -e". Using the famous vi (press "i" to active insert mode) enter the following line:

5 0 * * * /bin/rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Safari/*

Then save and exit using [Esc][:][x][Enter]. From now on, Safari's cache will be cleared every day at 00:05 am. Shouldn't be too hard to adapt for other times of the day.

Stefan Rubner, 2004-08-31

And for the few of us who:

- go to bed before 00:05 and
- shut off their computers at night

anacron is a better choice. Installing it and adding

7 5 safari.deletecache /bin/rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Safari/*

to /etc/anacrontab

will delete the cache once a week (anacron wil also trigger other maintenance tasks which may be skipped on systems not running 24-7).

Ole Saalmann, 2004-08-31

Onyx does the same thing as well - as well as all other caches, customizing your finder, erasing logs, etc...

You can find it at http://www.titanium.free.fr - running it once a month or so keeps my pbook neat and lean...

Alex, 2004-08-31

Safari itself offers a "erase" cache option.

Just go to the Safari menu and select the approriate option (in Italian language "Vuota la cache").
You can also do this directly from the keyboard with the Apple+alt+E(mpty).

Of course anacron is a more elegant solution but, all this automatic routines scare me a bit :-)

Pieter, 2004-08-31

Ole's tip is the one that doesn't need constant watching-over or remembering. I use DeskTopConsole, however, so I kinda watch stuff going on in my system anyways. ;)

Ryan, 2004-09-01

If this is a Safari built-in option it should be scriptable. I am not sure, that removing the cache directory won't break stuff in the future versions which are believed to contain a lot more moronic code[tm].

Just me EUR0.02

Regards,
/k

Karsten W. Rohrbach, 2004-09-01

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