How To Speed Up Your Mac Web Browser

Do you get frustrated as your Internet browser takes longer and longer to load sites?  After a few weeks of heavy use, do you sit tapping your fingers while websites load line by line?  If this sounds like you, then your browser’s cache needs to be cleared.

All Internet browsers hold information on sites visited.  Temporary files are stored by the browser in order to load the site quicker should there be a slow connection speed.  These files are commonly known as the cache and your computer will have a certain amount of memory set aside for them.  Unfortunately, once the cache begins to get full, the cache itself causes the very thing it is intended to prevent.  The browser slows down.  In order to stop this happening, the cache needs to be cleared on a regular basis.

This is the way to clear the browser cache on the majority of Mac machines:

1 Open the Internet browser.  With a Mac, this is likely to be Safari.

2 You now have several choices.  You can either clear the history alone (this is the list of websites you have previously visited), clear the cache on its own, or clear both and reset Safari.   Clearing the history alone will erase details of all the sites you have visited but will not clear all the other files associated with those websites.  This will make some difference to the speed of your browser, but not a vast amount.

Clearing the cache alone will increase the speed of your browser but some files will still be held to maintain your history listing.

The most efficient way to speed up your browser would therefore be to clear both the history and the cache, resetting the browser to its default state.

3 If you wish to clear the history alone, navigate to the word History in the banner at the top of the page.  Click on this and choose clear history from the menu.

4 If you wish to clear the cache alone, then click on the bold word Safari in the banner at the top of the screen.  This will open a dropdown box.  Choose the empty cache option from the menu.

5 If you wish to reset Safari completely, then, again in the Safari menu, choose reset Safari from the dropdown list.

Using any of these techniques will make a difference in the speed of your browser.  Clearing the cache regularly will keep your browser working at optimum speeds.  Anyone with a mechanical appliance, from cars to boilers, will know performing regular maintenance keeps the system running smoothly.  Computers are no different.  Perform regular maintenance on your Mac or PC and it will run efficiently for years.