Working with Top Sites in Safari 4

Tuesday, July 14 2009

By: chrisb

See the current state of your most common websites

Safari 4 Top Sites
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One of the most prominent features of Safari 4 is Top Sites. Top Sites is (by default) a 4 x 3 grid of thumbnails of your favorite websites. Top Sites shows you if the web page has been updated with a blue star on the top right corner. You can click on the page thumbnail to go directly to that page.

To me, Top Sites is pretty gimmicky and of limited use. List most people, I have a certain set of websites that I visit on a regular basis and they are bookmarked. Most of the rest of my web surfing is Google searches.

Top Sites is also pretty slow especially compared to the speed of the rest of Safari 4. For each thumbnail, Safari needs to load the page and compare it to the page in your History to see if it has changed.

Despite its faults, Apple really wants you to use and love Top Sites. When I upgraded to Safari 4, Safari changed my default window and tab to Top Sites. That meant that every time I opened a new window or tab, I saw Top Sites. This behavior is easy enough to change:

Go to Safari Preferences
In the General tab, change "New windows open with" and "New tabs open with" to something besides Top Sites. (Personally, I prefer Empty Page because then I don't have to wait for some home page to load every time I open a new window or tab.)

If you want to get back to the Top Sites page once you have removed it as your default load page, click on the grid icon on the far left of the Bookmarks Bar.

You can alter which pages show up in Top sites by clicking on the Edit button on the bottom left of the Top Sites page. You will then see an X and a push pin next to every thumbnail. Clicking the X will keep that page from ever showing in Top Sites. Clicking the push pin will keep that page always in Top Sites.