How to Revert Safari 5.1 to Its Old Single-Process Mode

Jason Sims:

Annoyed by Safari 5’s tendency to spontaneously reload pages when you didn’t ask it to? There’s a workaround for it, but it introduces a few problems of its own. Some Safari extensions will not work, and some of the new gestures won’t work either.

What you do is enable Safari’s hidden Debug menu, and turn off the on-by-default “Use Multi-process Windows” option. I ran Safari like this for a few hours yesterday, and it seems to help with Safari 5.1’s general sluggishness (when you have a lot of windows and tabs open) too. But that fact that most Safari extensions (or at least the ones I care about) no longer work in this mode is a deal-breaker for me.

What I’m trying today is switching to the WebKit nightly builds.

★ Tuesday, 20 September 2011