Once I completed my ML upgrade and restarted, I opened up Safari as I always do. My standard start page (http://www.apple.com/startpage/) came up fine. Then I tried to browse to GMail. The progress bar quickly moved to about 25% complete, but then it just hung, and the page was never rendered. Thinking it was a GMail issue, I tried CNN...and Facebook...and my company SSL portal...all the same. Meanwhile I had the Pinwheel of Death spinning in my browser while the Safari Web Content process spiked to near 100%. The Console app showed nothing relating to Safari.
I reset Safari and cleared everything I could check -- no change. I disabled Java, JavaScript, and all plugins from the Safari preferences -- no change. So I tried some Google-Fu, looking for terms related to Safari, Mountain Lion, "Web Content", and CPU looking for ideas -- nothing. So I bailed on Safari and started using Chrome in the interim (which has been nice).
I didn't want to give up, so I tried again today. I came a bit closer when I found this article on the Apple Support Community. The process didn't solve my problem, but I keyed on the following quote:
Flash CONTENT itself was not sucking up the CPU, but merely the Flash PLUGIN BEING INSTALLED was what sucked up the CPU time.
So I went General Sherman on my plugins. Typically you find plugins in one of two places:
/Library/Internet Plugins/
~/Library/Internet Plugins/
Granted, the second location isn't a single location (every user potentially has his own plugins), but you get the idea. So I closed all my browsers, opened a terminal session and ran the following three commands:
sudo rm -rf /Library/Internet Plugins/*
cd ~
rm -rf Library/Internet Plugins/*
I restarted my laptop, opened Safari, and viola! Safari opened every page I navigated to. Of course it complained of missing plugins, but I have installed the latest releases of Flash and Java 6 so far without issue. In order to get Java 6 running in Safari again, I also needed this command:
sudo ln -s /System/Library/Java/Support/CoreDeploy.bundle/Contents/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin
Just make sure you get the whole command on a single line (no carriage returns).
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