Mac owners who use the Safari browser sometimes find that they start to get the 'spinning beachball' cursor fairly often, while Safari takes a short pause to contemplate life. I found a couple of hints that are supposed to fix this:

  • Under Safari Preferences...select Autofill and then turn off "other forms."
  • Quit Safari and delete your ~/Library/Safari/Icons directory. This caches the 'favicons' which may be associated with each site and it can, apparently, get a bit clogged up.
I've just tried these, and things seem snappier, though it's a bit early to say for certain... Follow-up, a day later - yes, it certainly seems to have helped a lot.