Safari 14.0 Top Sites no longer an option?

hello all,

i just tried adding an empty folder to my Favorites list. i renamed it "Top Sites". i then added some websites to the folder. now my start page has this:

once i click the thumbnail, i get this:

i don't know if it will help everyone, but it's close enough for me.

have fun.

I would disagree, huge difference, and huge disruption to my very efficient workflow. Tiny icons instead of large thumbnails that actually showed a snapshot of a particular website. The favorites as shown above to me, is not much different than just the bookmarks bar. Why in the world remove Top Sites? At least leave it as an option. Safari is now unusable to me and I may just use Chrome for all browsing needs.

like every other suggestion i posted, it's just that- a suggestion. i'm not telling anyone that they have to use them. nor am i claiming them to be solutions for everyone. complain to apple. but i doubt they will go backwards. if everyone has happy with the status quo, we'd all still be driving model t cars and beating our dirty clothes on rocks in a river. maybe try giving apple some suggestions instead of just crying about the change.

Feedback - Safari - Apple

Like everyone else who used their homepage to make computer time easier, I adapted as much as I could since Apple made this unannounced and stupid decision to eliminate top sites. I put my top sites onto my "reading list", which gives me slightly larger icons than favorites does. I also eliminated everything but reading list and favorites from my start page, to de-clutter the page while I am using it. This is not a perfect solution at all, but it kept me working, although not quite as efficiently as before. The icons are too small, and they seem to move around with use, while top sites allowed me to place the icons in the order I wanted.

All Apple has to do is make top sites an option again. One fo the few things I dislike about Apple products is when the software engineers come up with something new and not so great, but force everyone to use it by not giving us options. I want my option for top sites restored. Pretty simple. If Apple really felt like treating us right, they would give us more appearance control for top sites. I liked the original version, before Apple did all of their post-Jobs "smoothing" of the interfaces.

Apple--if you bother to read any of this, give us the option to have top sites back. We liked it. We used it. We are ****** that you got rid of it.

Never have I used Apple's feedback form to complain, but I did over the loss of "Top Sites".

I recommend all who miss/need this feature in their workflow do the same: https://www.apple.com/feedback/safari.html

To recap what Top Sites did, for those who think pinning favorites is a (sorta) replacement:

1. Top Sites displayed a thumbnail of the URLs you frequently visited. (The pin-your-favorites solution only shows the favicon. The new Start Page does this.)
2. Top Sites allowed one to pin sites one wanted to keep. (The pin-your-favorites solution does this, but less intuitively. The new Start Page does not do this.)
3. Top Sites allowed one to delete sites one did not want. (The pin-your-favorites solution does this, but less intuitively. The new Start Page does not do this.)
4. Top Sites allowed one to organize sites once they were pinned. (The pin-your-favorites solution does this, but less intuitively. The new Start Page does this, but less intuitively.)
5. Top Sites was adjustable from 12, 16, or 20 sites. (The pin-your-favorites solution has no controls; instead it will drop down and show all the sites bookmarked, but it does not stay open long enough to grab something from below the fold and bring it up—one needs to go into the Bookmarks to do that. The new Start Page does not do this.)
6. Top Sites was responsive design, it filled one's window with what one wanted and did not was space doing that. (The pin-your-favorites solution leaves gobs of wasted space on both sides of a 27 inch monitor. The new Start Page does leaves gobs of wasted space on both sides of a 27 inch monitor. Worse, the wider one makes the window, the new Start Page stays the same width ... it is not intuitive or responsive.)

That's one of the most absurd and useless downgrades I've ever seen. The tragicomic side is that the problem could be solved with a single line of code: the ability to choose a folder other than the "Favorites" one to populate the Start Page. I hope they realize it soon and implement this ridiculously simple feature in one of the next updates...

I was surprised and ticked at the same discover.y. However, I've found that if you add whatever websites you want as Top Sites, to the "Add page to Reading List" icon in the address window, they end up functioning the same as Top Sites.

I just ignore the mess of "Favorites" on the start page, and use the icons in the Reading List, to take me to my most used sites.

They should really fix this by getting rid of the cumbersome & curious Favorites feature, just rename the Reading List, "Top Sites" and we can all get back to what we were doing, before being so rudely interrupted.....

Thank You Shappy, I have managed to find all my sites and save them into bookmarks... VERY HELPFUL as an interim fix.

i have my favorites list on the start page. i simply added my "top sites" to this list:

you can now use the "top sites" button to open the start page:

not that much of a difference really.

i found the top sites button again in Safari>View>CustomizeToolbar. it's now labelled "Start Page" but the button looks exactly the same as it did when it was called "top sites"

you can also "drag and drop" the favorites icons on the start page into whichever order you would like them to be in after adding them.

i screen grabbed your post to show you where tab overview is:

i dragged them left and held the mouse clicked until the words turned to small icons before releasing it.

maybe press and hold a bottom corner of your trackpad and drag with another? i'm guessing at this point.