Safari Problem on MacBook

Can anybody here think of a reason Safari would all of a sudden start hogging resources to the point of crashing my MacBook? It is using close to 100% CPU capacity (according to Activity Monitor), halves the estimated remaining battery charge when open, heats up to an abnormal temp; and eventually gives me the spinning beach ball of death, thus crashing the system. A couple of times, it was so frozen up so tightly that I couldn't even bring up the Force Quit dialog with the Option+Cmd+Esc keystroke. Never had a crash this bad since ditching Windows. Ouch.

I do stream online movies and TV shows on occasion and that is actually the last thing I tried to do before this started happening (at fastpasstv.com). Could I have picked up some kind of malware that has attached itself to Safari and making it run this way? The system runs fine after closing the browser. Any ideas? Anything I can do to further diagnose this problem?

Did a search before starting this thread and it seems resetting Safari is the most frequent piece of advice for a problem like this. I did that, the problem persists.

I also downloaded the latest update from Apple (iDVD update) last night. I don't think that had anything to do with this, tho.

What kind of extensions are you using with Safari? Usually that symptom is not caused by Safari itself (which is not a resource hog) but an add on or extension. To check, just disable all Safari extensions from the Safari preference menu (if you have any). Also, are you using Anti Virus software?

The only extension (plug-ins? same thing?) I'm currently running is Safari Ad Blocker, but I was running that long before this problem occurred. I went ahead and Un-enabled plug-ins, tho, to see if that makes any difference. No anti-virus software on my Macs.

Problem seems to have worked itself out. CPU is back to under 1% when I have Safari open. Wish I knew what happened and how it ironed itself out...

I'm "guessing" it was the Safari Ad Blocker. We have had reports of high CPU usage on certain machines when this was used. Anyway, I'm glad it worked itself out. Have fun.