I upgraded to Safari 4 once it was out of beta--or so I thought. This thing crashes all the time! Every time I open it, almost, it freezes up and I have to force-quit. Sometimes this happens a few times before my startup page will actually load. My friend who did use the Safari 4 beta and then upgraded to the final release says that, for him, the beta was actually more stable! I do have SafariStand installed, even though I never use it--could that be the problem? I don’t see an option in the preferences to uninstall it. Can you help, or should I go back to Firefox?

We sympathize with your frustration, having experienced the same chronic issue with Safari freezing up on launch. Nothing is more annoying than a Web browser that refuses to browse the Web, huh? The morning we read your email, Software Update had an update to Safari (version 4.0.2), so try that and see if it makes things work a little better.

If that doesn’t help, your next move should be to uninstall SafariStand, since you don’t use it much anyway. (For readers unfamiliar with SafariStand, it’s a SIMBL plug-in that adds more menu items to Safari, like killing animated GIFs, altering sites’ appearances, and a lot more.) Look for a file called SafariStand.bundle in Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins. Delete it and restart Safari, and you should be good to go. Since doing both of those things, we’ve gone from Safari locking up while loading the homepage 60 percent of the time to almost never.

How to delete SafariStand: Find this file, delete it, and restart Safari.

If you get Safari 4 working again and find you miss SafariStand, head to hetima.com/safari/stand-e.html and download a new Safari 4–compatible version, available for Tiger and Leopard Macs. The plug-in is freeware.