#FF00AA

There’s been some discussion yesterday that just having Safari open would slow down your computer, but I wanted to wait until Dave Hyatt replied on the Surfin’ Safari blog: there it is.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t say much other than: your methodology sucked, it’d be easier to debunk your claims or fix our performance if you’d been a little more consistent and specific. He then proceeds to list every web feature that slows down web browsers, and how Safari is or has been improving in each category (which makes an interesting read for Safari users).

I’d like to first state that it’s dangerous to jump to any general conclusions when the sample set of pages is very small. In the example article cited above, the author visited five Web sites and clicked around within them. It’s possible that this pathological behavior is specific not just to one Web site but possibly even to one specific page on that Web site. In order to identify the problem it would be better to try the test again with each individual page.

And I can’t really blame Hyatt for using that reply, because the other reason I didn’t post this earlier (beyond the fact that my brain has been in a semi-coma lately) is that the Macenstein post left me with the same feeling. You don’t publish such inflammatory graphs without providing a precise, definite, scientific walkthrough to replicate them.