Your MacBook Air needs fewer tabs.

Yes, you have too many tabs open.

The reason Safari slows down is simple: your MacBook Air probably has 8GB of RAM. Each tab uses 50–100MB even when Safari suspends inactive ones. Stack up 30+ tabs and you’re eating 3GB+ just for tabs. The OS itself needs 4GB. That leaves almost nothing for Safari to breathe, so it starts swapping to the SSD—which is way slower than RAM.

What to do: close tabs you don’t need. Seriously. If you’re like me and refuse to part with tabs, use a session manager like OneTab to save them as a list. Or switch to Chrome with a tab suspender like The Great Suspender—Chrome is a memory hog, but at least it suspends aggressively. On macOS, you can also enable “Show tab bar” → set “Tabs” in Safari’s preferences to “When using a tab bar” (not helpful on its own). The real fix is limiting open tabs to under 20.

If you keep hitting this wall, next laptop get 16GB RAM minimum. But for today: close the tabs.

Future You will thank Future You for closing them.