Chosen Solution

while on safari i keep getting the rainbow spinning wheel do you think i have to replace the hard drive? i have a macbook (13" alum late 2008) / with my apple care expired

I would start be emptying Safari’s cache and reset it. Reboot your machine and see if that helps. If it doesn’t it can probably be a corrupt p-list file or a permissions problem, and the easiest way to resolve that is to completely delete Safari and reboot and reinstall/ repair permissions. Do you get the spinning beach ball on all applications, or just Safari?

Use Firefox. I have the same problem, Safari just gives the beachball of death. I’ve tried everything, including a reinstall of Snow Leopard and a reinstall of Safari (and cache clearing and pram clearing and repairing permissions, etc etc etc.) Everything else works fine. Took to an Apple Store. Eventually they diagnosed a failing hard drive. I replaced it and all is well.

A lot of the solutions are from long ago. Here’s an update with a more recent Mac system. Problem: The spinning wheel would show up about every 15-30 secs and Safari would stall for about 5 sec. I cruised lots of forums and there were lots of suggestions. The three steps that solved it for me were:

  1. Clear Safari history.
  2. Trash the preferences file “com.apple.Safari.plist”, located at: HD > (your user account) > Library > Preferences. Restart Safari.
  3. Run Disk Utility, “Repair Permissions”. iMac 27", OS 10.9, Safari 9, 1. 1 TB.