Or, why is Safari Web Content eating my Mac’s memory?
If you, like me, open up many programs at the same time, and in these programs, open up many documents and tabs at the same time, then, like me, you also keep a close eye on what your CPU and memory are doing.
And if you do that, you most probably have noticed that lately, there is a new kid in town eating your Mac’s memory: Safari Web Content.
So, you wonder, what is this Safari Web Content process that’s working so intensive, while there is already a Safari process working too?
Well, the answer is, that starting from Safari 5.1, Apple’s developers have seriously increased the security of the browser!
Apple Safari Web Content
Typically, a malicious browser exploit uses the way your browser parses the visited web content, and start the attack from there. Apple’s engineers have now totally redesigned Safari, and split it up over 2 processes, the main Safari process, and the Safari Web Content process, which does nothing but the actual parsing of the web content. This makes sure that in case of an exploited buffer overflow, or a browser bug, there is a clear limit to the damage that can be done. Even if you get into the process (being the Safari Web Content process), and are able to execute code, you can still only do what the sandbox allows you to do, and will never be able to write files or read someones documents.
And, as a nice extra: if some script on some website hangs your browser, you can kill the Safari Web Content Process, and can continue surfing without having to close Safari and all your open tabs!
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Wow! that’s just great. I would be fine if it takes a lot of my memory as long as I am protected while I’m on the web. I believe there’s always a way in some corners to make the processing faster though.
Cool expalnation, thanks it was more than a little helpful to finally know this.
Like lenard above, I’m very happy for both the securioty and stability the “Safari Web Content process” provides. Still, it’s enormously expensive, on all my computers it tops to over a gig of real RAM used w/ very little on line use and then goes quickly over 1.5 gb of real RAM w/in minutes of regualr online use.
Hopefully the engineers can streamline it.
Is Firefox as secure, it uses only a small fraction of that amount of RAM.
And, do you happen to know what googles “Chrome” is and if it runs on macs?
One final question: why’s there no Author or posting date to the original article above?
That would seem strange, except that i see it more and more commonly all the time. Did I miss a socaila trend? It sacks the credibilty to an extent whenever these basic things are missing. Maybe the site should considser that.
I think it’s isn’t cool at all. You article is great but in my case Safari is slowing down my computer so much that working is becoming a nightmare.
Security? More like protecting Safari from crashing due to unstable 3rd party plugins and other bloatware coming from Facebook.
But this feature not only introduces problems with memory, but resources as well hogging over 100 percent on the CPU, and slowing down the entire safari experience.
Apple engineers should take note from Chrome and have a web renderer for EVERY webpage open rather than a single web process.