HOW TO Quickie: Decrease Safari's Loading Time

By default, Apple's Safari browser has an Initial Timed Layout Delay of 1 second before any data is parsed and then rendered in the browser. Apple made that a little conservative to say the least. So what you can do is decrease that time to say one fourth of a second. The actual setting is stored in Safari's preference file, which you will need to edit. Make sure Safari is closed and exited, and then browse to Safari's preferences file at ~/Library -> Preferences -> com.apple.Safari.plist. You can either open the plist file in the PList editor if you have that installed which I believe comes with XCode's developer tools, or you can edit it in any text editor. If you open it in the PList editor, add WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay with a value of 0.25. If you are doing this in a text editor, add the following two lines inside of the < dict> tag. Note: Delete the spaces between each "< " and tag.

< key>WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay< /key> < real>0.25< /key>

For those of you that are terminally-inclined, one line in the terminal will do the same tweak. While Safari is closed and exited, open up a terminal window and enter in the following line:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25