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 imagesof 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

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