Apple Safari 4 Beta Top Sites

Quite a few users seem to dislike the new Top Sites feature in the Safari 4 Beta browser. Are you in this group? Would you like to remove Top Sites, including the Top Sites button on the Safari toolbar? Here is a brief explanation of how Safari Top Sites works and how to remove this feature, if you wish.

This Google Chrome-ish feature will track your browsing habits and display a page of thumbnail images of the websites you visit most often. Then, you can click any thumbnail to quickly jump to the website. I haven’t decided yet if this is merely eye candy or will be worthwhile for me.

customize safari 4 top sites

The Safari Top Sites toolbar button is located to the right of the Bookmarks button and can be used to toggle the feature on and off. You’ll find an Edit button and History search box near the bottom of the Top Sites page.

The Edit button allows the number of Top Site thumbnails to be set to show 24, 12 or 6 images (small, medium or large). Icons also appear allowing you to remove or pin favorite websites to a particular location in the Top Sites grid.

When website content has changed since your last visit, Top Sites will alert you by showing a page curl with a star in the upper right of the thumbnail image.

You can also drag URLs from the Safari address bar into Top Sites to add a new website. I’m not a big fan of Top Sites at this point – but maybe this feature will grow on me.

Warning! Do not experiment with Terminal commands or instructions. If you don’t understand what a Terminal command does – then don’t use it. It is extremely easy to trash your system settings using Unix commands.

how to disable safari 4 top sites

Close Safari and go to Applications → Utilities and open the Terminal application. Enter the command below into the Terminal window and press the Return key. Then close Terminal and restart Safari.

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites -bool NO 

Edit the Terminal command with “NO” or “YES” – depending on whether you wish to disable or enable Safari Top Sites.