If the name of your hard disk contains a non-ASCII character, such as a symbol, diacritical, or two-byte character, Safari may not work. If you quit and reopen it, it may work briefly again. Here's the specific symptoms you see:
- Safari quits loading websites soon after you open it, or partially displays a webpage.
- The blue progress bar stops advancing.
- The Status Bar indefinitely reads Contacting or Loading <site_name>.
Advanced Tip: The Console may say "Safari error: Conversion to encoding 'some number' failed for string 'string including offending character'."
This happens with Safari 1.2.2 in Mac OS X 10.3.4.
To avoid the issue, simply update to Mac OS X 10.3.6 or later. As a temporary solution, you can rename your hard disk.