---
title: Safari Speedbumps
date: 2017-05-03
---

For a long time now, I’ve had a problem with Safari taking a long time to load a
website when I first navigate to it: there will be a long pause (5–10 sec) with
no visible progress or network traffic. Then there will be a burst of traffic,
the site will load fully inside of a second, and every page I visit within that
site afterwards will be lightning fast.

The same thing happens whether I’m at work, at home, or on public wifi (using a
VPN of course). I’ve tried disabling all extensions and I’ve also tried using
Chrome. So this was mystifying to me.

But I think I might have finally found the source of the problem. I was in
Safari’s preferences window and noticed this little warning on the Security tab:

•figure["/posts/img/safari-fraud.png" #:width "776"]{Safari preferences pane
showing a problem with the ‘Safe Browsing Service’}

I unchecked that box, and the problem seems to have disappeared.

Now, I haven’t yet been able to find any official information on exactly how
Safe Browsing Service works, but it’s not hard to make an educated guess. If
it’s turned on, the first time you browse to a website, the name of that website
would first get sent, in a separate request, to Apple’s servers, which would
return a thumbs up/thumbs down type of response. A problem on Apple’s end would
cause these requests to time out, making any website’s first load terribly slow.
And as the screenshot shows, clearly there *is* a problem on Apple’s end,
because the Safe Browsing Service is said to be “unavailable”. (It says it’s
only been unavailable for 1 day but I have reason to believe that number just
resets every day.)

The fact that disabling the setting on Safari fixed the problem in Chrome too
leads me to believe that this is in fact an OS-level setting, enforced on all
outgoing HTTP requests, not just a Safari preference.

Anyway, if you are having this problem, see if disabling Safe Browsing Service
solves it for you.