It’s time to tip a hat to Apple for a major change they’ve made in their latest desktop operating system, macOS High Sierra. Last year, I wrote about how Safari was a memory hog. At times, it would be using 5,6, even 8 or 9 GB of memory. I would have to quit it every few days to get it to stop being sluggish.
Since the release of High Sierra, I have noticed that Safari’s memory usage has dropped a great deal. Right now, with my iMac running for more than four days, Safari is only using about 3 GB of RAM. And this with more than a dozen tabs open.
This is especially important for people with Macs that don’t have a lot of RAM, such as laptops. When apps use more RAM than they need, the computer needs to access virtual memory, files written to disk, that are much slower than RAM. So any improvement in memory usage in an app that is used as much as Safari means that it will run faster, the entire computer will be less sluggish, and also has a positive effect on battery life.
So thanks for fixing this, Apple.