IS YOUR MAC SLUGGISH OR RUNNING HOT? HERE’S WHAT TO DO
It’s happened to you, probably many times over the years: You’re using Safari, and it starts to feel like molasses. You’re working among several apps, and you start to have to wait for seconds or longer as you switch between them, adding frustration. Or you touch your laptop, and say, “Yowch!”—it’s much hotter than expected.
What’s going on? The complex interplay of Mac hardware, macOS software, third-party background utilities and add-ons, and foreground apps can result in unexpected outcomes, like CPUs running hot, memory crunches, and sluggish performance. You can’t always pull one thread and untangle the problem. But you can pursue a few straightforward strategies to make things better without wasting lots of time. Try these actions the next time your Mac acts up.
Quit and relaunch your browser
Think back to the days in which browsers had windows only, no tabs, and didn’t automatically reopen tabs and windows after a restart. You could lose so much research progress. That’s far in the past, and now there’s essentially no penalty to quitting and relaunching.
Browsers can experience memory leaks, in which they allocate some of your Mac’s volatile or active memory (RAM) and don’t release it when they’re finished. This can happen in Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and others—Chrome was once a notable memory leaker and has gotten better, but Safari often swells too. I’ve found sometimes that a single nonforeground tab might be burning 1GB, according to Activity Monitor, your best friend when it comes to examining system resource usage.
Make sure you will have your tabs and windows reloaded:
> In Safari, make sure that Safari → Preferences → General has “Safari opens with” set to “All windows from last session.”
> In Chrome, go to Chrome → Settings → On Startup and choose “Continue where you left off.”
> In Firefox, go to Firefox → Preferences → General and check “Open previous windows and tabs.”
If your browser is sluggish or you’re having a systemwide problem, quit and relaunch the browser and see if things get
