how to remove ‘Top Sites’ in Safari

Feb 21

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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

Safari feedback

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About philastokes

Independent Software Developer, Technical Writer and Researcher at SentinelOne. Explaining the unexplainable with images, video and text. Scripting anything imaginable in AppleScript, Bash, Python and Swift.

Posted on February 21, 2012, in Safari 5.1 and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 13 Comments.

  1. vale | June 24, 2013 at 05:55

    good job! thx heaps

  2. jomama | April 21, 2013 at 03:10

    Thank you. Most. Annoying. “Feature”. EVER.

  3. sean | August 6, 2012 at 14:38

    Hi, Pretty sure I followed all the steps, but my top sites are still there. Thanks for this and all the other great tips and ideas.

    • philastokes | August 6, 2012 at 14:53

      Hi Sean

      Can you still see ‘Top Sites’ listed along the bookmark bar? In which case, go to Safari > Preferences > Bookmarks and unselect the ‘top sites’ option. If that’s not it, what makes you think Top Sites is still there?

      • sean | August 6, 2012 at 15:01

        Hi Phil, thanks for the quick replay. Maybe what Im calling top sites, isnt top sites.
        What I see is about 14 sites following the “show reading list” icon, and “show all bookmarks” icon. I dont see any top sites in the “bookmarks” drop down menue. thanks again!

        • philastokes | August 6, 2012 at 15:06

          Ah, those are sites you’ve saved in your Bookmarks Bar. To remove them, click the ‘Show all bookmarks’ icon, then in the sidepanel of the window select ‘Bookmarks Bar’. Select everything in there in the main panel and hit ‘delete’ to remove them all.

  4. erwinsanchez | July 27, 2012 at 21:21

    Do you know how to remove top hit ?

  6. Laura Lu | July 15, 2012 at 20:56

    Thank you so much!! 🙂

  7. Johnny | March 30, 2012 at 06:26

    Thank you 🙂

  8. Jane Giesbrecht | March 18, 2012 at 00:16

    Excellant! Thank you.

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