Safari 4.0 Turn OFF Top Sites?

None of those "fixes" stop Safari from visiting those websites and collecting the garbage and then throwing it away.

PLEASE TELL ME ! how to rip out Top Sites and the code that visits web pages behind my back, Please god!

Steady on!

All "top Sites" is doing is listing the last 12? sites YOU visited, and displaying them in a fancy pattern.

Disabling it as I described in post 3 fixes the issue.

Epochmaker wrote:
Disabling it as I described in post 3 fixes the issue.

No, that does Not stop Safari from visiting those sites over and over. If I could set it to update once a year, that would be fine.

Is this just a hack to increase the sale of new CPUs? Or to promote the page hits for their favoured sites? Or just to annoy end users with Unstoppable Features which demand resources?

It stinks.

I love Safari, but want to eliminate accumulation of Top Sites and cover flow of them. When I reset Safari to eliminate these, or if I manually delete each accumulated image, they come back after I return to Top Sites.

I completely dislike this feature. Why Apple decided to track the web sites I visit without asking my permssion. Plus it is much slower to find the site I need using top sites and also wait while it is going to load. I just need a perfectly clear and empty tab!!!

I completely dislike this feature. Why Apple decided to track the web sites I visit without asking my permssion. Plus it is much slower to find the site I need using top sites and also wait while it is going to load. I just need a perfectly clear and empty tab!!!

Then turn it off in preferences and set Safari to open with a blank tab. Also read through this thread thouroughly and see the other options offered to the Original Poster.

Personally I love them and use them as my home page, very quick to connect and easy to set up my favorite sites.

Cheers

Top Sites also caused a problem with cookies on my computer. I keep "Accept cookies" set to "Never" except when I have to accept them, such as when I'm buying something. After installing Safari 4, a cookie for twit.tv kept appearing in the list of cookies. Every time I deleted it, it came back. The only way I could make it stop was by disabling Top Sites as described in these posts.

Gentlemen:

I am trying to use Safari on a Windows machine, and I love (loved) the FULL PAGE Bookmarks & the increase/decrease font size buttons... but the "Top Sites & Cover Flow" are just an Unacceptable... INTRUSION.

I trade stocks for a living and I need to access dozens of different information sites all day long, so a FULL page for bookmarks is (Was) Great !

But, unfortunately, a recent Safari update has added the - Top Sites & Cover Flow "Features" and now my FULL PAGE of bookmarks has become... HALF a page of bookmarks, and the other HALF of the page has been taken over by a Big Black... BLOB called Top Sites, which I don't want or need.

I have read the posts on this forum, and have done web searches for a way to Get RID of this Unwanted "Feature" to no avail.

( One site referred to this "Feature" as the... "Beach Ball of Death.")

I do not have ANY use for these "Features" and I do NOT want the blocking of HALF of the bookmarks, the Wasted Disk Space, or the Waste of Windows Resources.


Let's keep it simple, Apple. Just make these "Features"... OPTIONAL !

Remember "User Friendly" ?

That's why people like Firefox so much !


I'm sure some people (Children?) really like the "Top Sites & Cover Flow", but I have no use for them,and just want to be rid of them !


There is no reason why you can't give us the OPTION to COMPLETELY REMOVE this "Feature"; unless, of course, you want to take the Microsoft type approach, and prefer to Force this on us, and not offer us the... CHOICE.

I love my iPod, I love my iPhone, and I was planning to get a Macbook for my next laptop, but this intrusion has given me reason for concern.

I'll check back to this post to see if Apple will give us the requested OPTION or not.

If not, I'll give up, go back to Firefox, and have a considerably lowered opinion of Apple's concern for the user.

Could we please just forget the "pros" & "cons" on this issue, and Satisfy EVERYONE by giving us the OPTION ?

Owhn - try posting in Safari for Windows and not Safari for Mac forum.

I've solved the problem...use Firefox.

That's like solving the World Climate Change Problem by moving to Mars!!!! You ignore the underlying problem.

Good luck with Firefox. I love the Top Sites feature and my pinned sites have never changed since I installed safari 4. No matter where I visit, Top Sites opens as my homepage with the same 12 sites I edited and pinned in the first place. I just clean my cache and history on quitting and have never had an issue. Great feature, Apple.

Cheers

Then turn it off in preferences and set Safari to open with a blank tab. Also read through this thread thouroughly and see the other options offered to the Original Poster.

Sigh: the feature cannot be turned off in the preferences. All the preferences setting does is to remove it from the bookmarks bar, but it still collects images of browsed sites in the background. This does not fix the main issues users have with the feature, namely

(1) Privacy issues

(2) Stability and performance problems when the process that collects the images chokes on some sites.

So Top Sites is not just another eye-candy feature that you can simply ignore if you don't like it - the inability to turn it off makes Safari 4 completely unusable for some users. Which is really a pity - I absolutely love Safari, and prefer it to Firefox in every way. But the lack of just one simple checkbox (or proplist setting) to turn off top sites means I still have to use Firefox at work.

steja wrote:
Sigh: the feature cannot be turned off in the preferences. All the preferences setting does is to remove it from the bookmarks bar, but it still collects images of browsed sites in the background.

Yep. It gobbles up CPU and writes all sorts of trash to disk for no purpose, given that the user has turned off the display of Top Sites. I suppose the programmers would reply that they did it this way so that when the user decides to turn Top Sites on again, all the info will be there for displaying a current Top Sites page. I guess it never occurred to them that some people might not want to ever turn it on again...

As for privacy issues, see my post at

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2097171&tstart=150

where I discuss a related problem. However, no one responded to that post so I guess people don't care much about privacy. (I find that hard to believe, though.)

There is a solution on page one of this thread.

WZZZ wrote:
There is a solution on page one of this thread.

Just Hawaiian_Starman's, and that requires a locking folder, which I prefer not to do. Many people suggest changing permissions and such on folders in the library in order to make things work a certain way. I always avoid doing that, because it may cause problems at some point in the future. You can never be sure how future releases of the software will use the locked folders.

It may be just me, but I think it is the programmer's responsibility to provide a solution, not the user's to implement work-arounds. (And yes, I know where to send suggestions to Apple.)

Amen to that.
by the way, even though I loved the visuality of the top sites I downgraded to safari 3 just because of this issue. I don't like it that it is forced on me.

I've also emptied and "Locked" the Webpage Previews cache file.

So far, no problem. Just wondering, where the thousands of Jpeg image files that were in the cache folder, will go to now? And if locking is a long term solution.

I checked in Console after locking the file and the message is:

com.apple.Safari[1789] Debugger() was called!
local Safari[1789] <Error>: CGImageDestinationCreate destination parameter is nil

Any possible future problem you think?