how to remove ‘Top Sites’ in Safari

If you are fed up with the ‘Top Sites’ feature in Safari 5, here’s how to remove it.

1. In Safari > Preferences > General, change ‘New windows open with’ and ‘New tabs open with’ to either ‘Homepage’ or ‘Empty page’ (as you prefer).

2. In Safari > Preferences > Bookmarks, uncheck ‘Include Top Sites’.

Now you also need to get rid of the caches, and to stop Safari from continually storing images of your web page history (Tip: Safari will still track your History in the normal way, but here we are going to prevent it from downloading the image files that are used in Top Sites), so:

3. In Safari > Reset Safari…, check ‘Reset Top Sites’ and ‘Remove all webpage preview images’.

Click ‘Reset’.

4. Go to your home folder Library (~/Library) by clicking on the Folder icon in the dock, pressing ‘shift-command-g’, and typing ~/Library in the box.

Navigate to Caches > com.apple.Safari.

5. Click once on the Cache.db file. Hit ‘command-i’ on the keyboard. In the Get Info panel that opens, check the ‘Locked’ box. Close the panel.

6. Click on the Webpage Previews folder in com.apple.Safari and press ‘command-i’. Check the ‘Locked’ box. Close the panel.

7. Navigate back to Caches > Metadata > Safari> Bookmarks. Go into the Bookmarks folder, hit ‘command-a’ and then ‘command-delete’ to send all the selected files to the Trash.

8. With the Bookmarks folder selected in Finder, press ‘command-i’ and check the ‘Locked’ box. Close the panel.

That’s it. No more ‘Top Sites’, and no more wasted time or space downloading and storing webpage previews! :- )

And what about later versions of Safari? There’s no way to remove Top Sites in Safari 7 that I know of (if you know different, please leave a comment below). However, there’s no reason to suffer in silence! Let Apple’s Safari dev team know how much you dislike it:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html

Related Posts
How to Troubleshoot Your Mac with FT2
how to clear Safari’s cookies on quit (Safari 7)
FastTasks – download the free OS X utility app from Applehelpwriter

are keyloggers ethical?

I recently helped a user track down a keylogger on his computer. While this case was certainly one of being ‘snooped’ on (the keylogger had been installed on his own machine by a third party), this got me to thinking: are keyloggers ever ethical?

While they can be used for nefarious purposes (spying on your partner or colleagues, for example), they can also help you track down a stolen laptop, aid companies in detecting illegal behaviour or corporate espionage by employees, and help parents protect their children from internet pests.

Feeling conflicted, I thought the best people to ask would be you! So what do you think? Click on one of the options below and hit ‘vote’ to take the poll, and/or leave your thoughts in the Comments!

how to remove a boot.efi file from Trash

Click on the Trash can on the Dock, hold down the ‘option’ key and click the ‘Empty’ button over there on the left side of the window. If this doesn’t do it, the file may be in the .Trash folder of your Time Machine (TM) or some other disk.

To find out if that’s so, follow this procedure:
 
1. Open Terminal.app, copy and paste the following command into the Terminal window
 
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder
 
Then press ‘Return’.
 
2. Open a Finder window. Navigate to the TM disk starting from its icon in  the left hand column. You should see some greyed out folders called .Trash and .Trashes. Click on these and have a look for the boot.efi file that we’re hunting down.
  
To remove the boot.efi file from the hidden trash, try the following:
 
3. Go back to Terminal and copy and paste the following:
 
sudo rm -rf
 
Do NOT press ‘Return’. Instead, press the Spacebar once, then use your cursor to drag the boot.efi file from the hidden folder in Step 2 and drop it in the Terminal window. Now press ‘Return’. You will be asked for an administrator password and given a warning which you can ignore. Type in your password, but notice that your typing will be invisible, so type carefully.

Press ‘Return’.
 
4. If you typed your password incorrectly, repeat step 3. If you typed it correctly, hopefully, your Trash is empty. 🙂
 
5. The last thing is to hide all the hidden files again, so copy and paste this:
 
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE; killall Finder
 
Then press ‘Return’.
 
You can close Terminal now.
 
 
Good luck!