“It’s time to tip a hat to Apple for a major change they’ve made in their latest desktop operating system, macOS High Sierra,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville.
“Last year, I wrote about how Safari was a memory hog,” McElhearn writes. “At times, it would be using 5,6, even 8 or 9 GB of memory. I would have to quit it every few days to get it to stop being sluggish.”
“Since the release of High Sierra, I have noticed that Safari’s memory usage has dropped a great deal,” McElhearn writes. “Right now, with my iMac running for more than four days, Safari is only using about 3 GB of RAM.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The myriad refinements we’re finding under the hood in High Sierra are significant and welcome.
it is hard to conceive how it could be using more memory. the only way is down.
This isn’t a refinement. It’s a long overdue bug fix. Welcome either way.
I am eternally grateful that Tim Cook pulled his head out his a$$ and finally delivered what should have been available years ago. How such a memory hog was permitted to be released is mind boggling.
Have you actually compared other browsers? Not just on the Mac either… Safari is the class leader for low power usage, small memory footprint and overall performance.
Well, I guess it is now. Don’t see it wasn’t available last year.
Because it’s that difficult to turn Safari off and back on?
One needn’t have to do that.
While I wait for Apple to actually finish APFS and for file system repair utility developers to catch up with APFS, I’m still running macOS 10.12.6 on all my Macs.
And I can say that Safari 11.0 on 10.12.6 can be a MASSIVE RAM HOG! I’ve never seen a bigger RAM hog ever. When I’ve got several sites open, Safari literally eats up every byte of RAM it can get it’s code on, hitting the available RAM ceiling. The difference from Safari 10.x is seriously, stunningly awful.
I look forward to being able to upgrade to 10.13, when it meets my needs. Until then, I’m frequently using my Free Memory app to grab back RAM for purposes other than Safari.
Note that, happily, Safari’s memory devouring ways have not actually caused a problem on my Macs. This is thanks to Apple having at last repaired their memory management such that hitting the RAM ceiling doesn’t bring anything to a crawl. The OS does its own freeing of RAM to accommodate what ever is demanding it at any one time.
… My MBP late 2013 has 16 GB of RAM for Safari 11 to eat on 10.12.6. Glutton.