Although these tips won't have you seeing magical results (with Safari downloading as quickly as either Chrome or Firefox), you will see some improvement. Even with that bit of conspiracy theory in check, there are things you can do to help Safari speed up the downloads. I am convinced this dogged speed was by design-in order to keep battery usage to a minimum. Or, in cases where I can easily copy the download URL, I'll open up a terminal window and use the wget command for really speedy downloads. So bad that I'll open up Chrome (a MacBook battery hog) to download larger files and then close it once the download is complete.
Soon after realizing my MacBook Pro battery life was greately extended by using Safari, I realized that the download speeds for Apple's browser were really, really, really bad.
