how to remove ‘Top Sites’ in Safari
If you are fed up with the ‘Top Sites’ feature in Safari, 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! :- )
Posted on February 21, 2012, in Safari 5.1 and tagged annoying, delete, disable, feature, hate, mac os, remove, safari, stop, top sites, turn off. Bookmark the permalink. 12 Comments.
Thank you. Most. Annoying. “Feature”. EVER.
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.
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?
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!
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.
Hey Phil,
Um, wouldnt that also delete all my bookmarks from the bookmarks drop down?
thanks man!
Hi Sean, I think we are somewhat at cross purpose here. Can you post a screenshot of what it is that you’re trying to remove?
Do you know how to remove top hit ?
Thank you!
Thank you so much!!
Thank you
Excellant! Thank you.