Disable Top Sites from Safari 7

Safari - View - Customize Toolbar can add/remove topsites in the toolbar, it doesn't do anything for the icon/button in favorites/bookmarks. I've not yet seen any way to remove that.

Tell them : Apple - Safari - Feedback

Safari creates (often unwanted) thumbnails of visited and even unvisited pages (like Facebook and twitter etc. of which I am not a user). It generates a bulk of caches to display those pages in the Top Sites view. This is a real resources and system drag. To prevent this, I have extensively googled and found instructions on this page: http://www.macinstruct.com/node/436. This has solved my problem for good.

Here a short version of the steps:

1. Empty Safari Caches by going to Safari> Preferences> Privacy > Remove all website data (you can do this selectively)
2. Then go to ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews and select this folder. Empty the folder, click folder again and Get Info. From there, click "Lock" folder. Nothing will be saved from now on. If you wish to revert at a later stage, just unlock.

Hope this helps the many who also wish to get rid of this problem.

I tried your method and it seems to work (so far). Thanks for posting a solution to this annoying Safari feature.

Guess I spoke too soon. Sorry, P3BL3ei, that trick is not working. Safari is still logging my "top sites", which is totally unnecessary.

I do wish Apple would offer a means to disable this annoying Safari feature.

Sorry, this is really annoying. But it works perfectly here, I have no more trashworthy thumbnails and caches. May I encourage you to give it another try. Use the instructions given in the mentioned/linked article rather than my short steps.

It is important that you clear the cache in Safari preferences first, close Safari, and then find and empty and lock that folder in the Finder. You will see that folder remains empty - at least mine does.

What I did in addition: In Safari Preferences> General> New tabs open with: choose Empty Page (instead of Top Sites).

Wish you success - please post another feedback, in the hope better advice will pop in here, should it remain a problem.

I have tried that procedure several times with no luck. I still have Top Sites.

As it exists, Top Sites is intrusive, redundant and provides links to sites for which I have no use. And yet we can't turn it off.

Until Apple remedies this, or a user hack is discovered, I am switching to Firefox.

Thanks again for a good try!

Oh dear, I am really sorry. My iMac and MBA are both still clean of that rubbish. No Top Sites anymore. I hope that the new OS X Maverick has an in-built solution in store so we do not have to make these complicated tricks.

Since about 3 days trying to download the upgrade, very lousy connection here.

Good luck to you, anyway.

Just a quick suggestion:

Locking the "Webpage Previews" folder works, but your system.log may very well be hogged with error messages for every page you visit.

Best way to completely disable TopSites & Bookmark Coverflow previews while you're at it:

Quit Safari & unlock the "Webpage Previews" folder again.

Open Terminal (Applications/Utilities) & paste:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2

then hit return & quit Terminal.

If you want to reactivate some dy:

defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy

You may need to use the sudo command or authorize yourself as an administrator. If not comfortable with the terminal, don't push it. Always back up before messing around with this stuff.

with mac using osx 10.8.5 from favorites bar you can remove it in bookmarks page but to stop it from reacuring you go to safari>preferences>general

then were it says new windows open with : change it to homepage

and new tabs open with :change it to homepage

this will stop top sites from reoccuring.

Worked perfectly. I can't figure out how to give you a "Solved my problem" mark! What next?

Message was edited by: Tam 183

Hi Gary,

I am hanging on Mountain Lion for now. I just upgraded to Safari 6.1.1 and got that nasty Top Sites icon in the Favorite Bar. I tried to disable it with your Terminal command but the Top Sites icon won't go away. Is this Terminal command specific to Mavericks? Is there a similar command for Mountain Lion? Thanks

I dislike the TopSites feature as well, if only that it shows others too much data about what I do. My history file is mine, whether it be limited to 6, 12, 24, or unlimited values.

Make a bookmark folder, and never put anything in it, or bookmark 6 of your actual most visited sites and start using TopSites if you want. The below instructions will explain how to force TopSites to list what you want it to, from nothing to full of just what you want.

I chose to use my "Favorites" bookmark folder, since I don't use bookmarks at all and use a bookmark manager service instead.

Go to your Preferences in Safari, click on the "General" tab at the top, set TopSites to "6 sites", set "Favorites Shows" and chose your empty folder, in my case, "favorites Shows: Favorites.

You can just make it look like this too:

And here is the result:

For me, clicking in the url bar and clearing it out would like the top 6 sites I visit, or at least, the top 6 sites based on some internal Apple logic, as well as my Favorites, which was and always is empty. Knowing favorites was empty, and nothing showed in it's place, I figured, setting the TopSites to my Favorites would be a good way to trick Safari.

If this doesn't work, you can go back to the steps where you are told to lock the folder, and instead of locking it, which is not always the best way, as Safari has a BOM ( Bill of Materials ) file, in it are instruction on how a file or folder that is a part of Safari should be set. Locked is not one of the ways. When you run repair permissions, or some other app does, the BOM is consulted, that is how it knows what permissions and settings to apply to files and folders, it is all in the BOM file.

Instead of locking the folder, drop the permissions and set it to root so no app can touch it.

sudo chown -R root:wheel ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage\ Previews

sudo chmod -R 000 ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Webpage\ Previews

In ther terminal, you can run `ls -la ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari | grep Webpage` and you will see:

d--------- 2 root wheel 68 Nov 19 04:24 Webpage\ Previews

compare that to a normal file:

drwxr-xr-x 8 my-name staff 272 Nov 9 00:31 Software Installers

As you can see by the "d---------" it is a directory and has no permissions to do anything, or interact with anything. I can try to cd into it with the terminal, I can try to write to it, it will not work, it is blocking anything from changing it.

Example:

$touch Webpage\ Previews/test # this should make a file called test in the "Webpage\ Previews" folder

touch: aaaaaa/test: Permission denied

Oops, it can't because of how we set the permissions. I still have a url bar that is empty, which is nice. If it revers or fails, I will report back here a solution.