Blog Archives
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 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
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
turn off Resume – the definitive solution!
Finally, someone’s come up with the definitive – and as far as I know only – successful solution to turning of the OS X Lion Resume feature. This little trick from poster billearl will stop your Mac opening all the apps that were still running when you shutdown/restart.
1. Close all windows and quit all apps.
2. In Finder, hold down the Option key and click ‘Go’ in the menu bar at the top.
3. Choose ‘Library’ (you have to have the Option key held down to see Library in the menu).
4. Navigate to Library > Preferences > ByHost > com.apple.loginwindow.[xxxxxxxxx].plist
The [xxxxxxxx] represent some interminable string of numbers and letters. Don’t mistake it for the similarly entitled Unix executable file. What you need to check is that its ‘loginwindow’ and ‘.plist’ at the end.
5. When you’re sure you’ve identified the right file, select it and press Cmd-i to show the ‘Get Info’ window. Click the ‘Locked’ option.
6. Now, test that it works. Close the ‘Get info’ window and the finder window. Open up Safari, Preview and a couple of windows. Do a restart and behold — if you followed the instructions correctly — a clean desktop!
Now, a small word of caution. One thing this trick won’t do is stop your apps like Safari and Preview from re-opening the last page/file when you manually fire them up after restart. In order to get them to forget your last opened page/file, you also need to do this:
7. Go to the ~/Library/ Saved Application State folder.
8. Select all the contents inside and send them to Trash.
9. Right-click on the Saved Application State folder’s icon and choose ‘Get Info’ (or press cmd-i).
10. Click the ‘Locked’ option. If it’s greyed out, go down to the padlock at the bottom, click on that and enter your password. You should now be able to check the ‘Locked’ option.
And finally, after those ten (phew…) steps…no more Resume!
applehelpwriter.com 