Edit and use Safari 5′s Top Sites
Mac Tip #443, 30 June 2010
The Safari Top Sites feature gives you quick access to your favorite websites. Here’s how to change the size of the thumbnail previews, remove and add sites, and pin sites so they’re always handy.
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Control Top Sites settings in Safari Preferences
Top Sites displays thumbnail previews of certain websites, grouped on one page. Click a thumbnail to go straight to that site.
Safari Top Sites.
To choose whether or not to display the Top Sites page, and whether or not to display a link to the Top Sites page in Safari’s toolbar go to Preferences… under the Safari menu.
Go to the Bookmarks tab of the Preferences window and check or uncheck the item to Include Top Sites on the Bookmarks Bar.
Go to the General tab of the Preferences window and choose what should be displayed when opening a New Window or a New Tab. Choices include Top Sites, Home Page, Empty Page, Same Page and Bookmarks.
Click Top Sites in the Bookmarks Bar
Top Sites icon (enlarged).
One way to call up the Top Sites is to click the ‘grid’ icon in the Bookmarks Bar. After you click the Top Sites icon the Top Sites page is displayed.
Tip: if you click a page thumbnail and nothing happens, check to make sure you aren’t in the middle of editing the Top Sites page. See below for more information.
Edit the Top Sites page
To edit the Top Sites page click the Edit button at the bottom left of the window. Each icon gains an X and a thumbtack icon at top left.
Make your changes, then click the Done button to make your changes stick.
Change the thumbnail size
Preview thumbnails come in 3 sizes: small, medium and large. The larger they are, the fewer fit on the page.
To change thumbnail size enter mode as described above.
At bottom right of the Top Sites window choose your preferred thumbnail size. Small fits 24 pages into the page; Medium fits 12; and Large fits 6.
Remember to click the Done button to make your changes stick.
Remove pages from Top Sites
You may find pages in Top Sites that you don’t want to keep around. Enter mode as described above, then click the X icon for any page you want to remove. That thumbnail disappears and all the others shuffle position, pulling in a page from History to fill the gap.
Click the Done button to make your changes stick.
Pin a page
To ‘pin’ a thumbnail page to a particular position enter the Edit mode as described above. Drag the thumbnail to the desired position then click the thumbtack icon at top left of the preview. The thumbtack icon glows blue when it’s active.
Click the Done button to make your changes stick.
Add a page to Top Sites
To add a page of your own choosing to the Top Sites page open a new Safari window (File — New Window ).
In the new window enter the address for the new site and press Return to visit the site.
Then drag the favicon from the left-hand end of the Address Bar so it replaces a thumbnail in the Top Sites window. The site will open in that window. If you then go back to see all Top Sites, you’ll see your chose website has taken its place in Top Sites.
You can also drag a link from a document or email message in the same way.
A dragged link won’t replace a pinned thumbnail, so make sure to drag the link on to a site that isn’t pinned.
The Top Sites page is very handy. Also watch how the thumbnails are able to update from the live sites.
For example, in my first screenshot Twitter was showing its Fail Whale page. By the time I finished writing this tip the thumbnail for Twitter was showing its normal set up recent updates.
Tell us in the Comments at the website your experiences with Safari’s Top Sites.
See more from: Snow Leopard,Web browsers
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* 10 comments… read them below and tell us what you think.
I am enjoying this tip. Have some bad Safari habits that mean I ‘lose’ a window I want open quite often. Using top sites is fun and I get in and out of those windows faster and with less frustration. Cheers, Miraz, for another great tip.
Thanks Pat. I’m glad you’ve enjoyed this one. I used to always open a tab or browser window as blank, but now I find I use Top Sites instead.
Another reader pointed out by email that other browsers have or can do a Top Sites thing too, sometimes by installing an extension.
I have inadvertently clicked the X in the edit page against my webmail browser. How do I undo this action?
That’s a great question.
1] Open *2* Safari windows and move them so you can see both.
2] In 1 window *Edit* the Top Sites.
3] In the other window visit the site you want to add to Top Sites (eg MacTips).
4] Drag the URL from eg MacTips from the Address Bar of window #2 into the Edit Top Sites window. The page will be added to your Top Sites.
5] Now pin that site if you wish and click Done on the Edit Top Sites window.
I’d like to know how to make the positions of the saved pages on the Top Sites screen stick in Safari 5. Even after pushing down the blue pin they still move all over the place wen a new page is added. It then takes some work sliding them all over the place to get back to the arrangement I wanted. This happens every time a new page is added to Top Sites. It is frustratingly like playing a child’s game of ’tiles’.
Secondly, how do you make Top Sites your home page so that the browser starts on Tops Sites every time you open the browser? THere seems to be no way off doing this in Safari 5.
Max, it’s a bit odd your sites move around. I just experimented with deleting one site I didn’t want and a potential site just zipped right into the empty slot. Nothing else moved.
As for your question about making Top Sites the Home Page, read what I wrote above: “Go to the General tab of the Preferences window and choose what should be displayed when opening a New Window or a New Tab. Choices include Top Sites, Home Page, Empty Page, Same Page and Bookmarks.”
Choose Top Sites.
Hi Miraz,
Thanks for that. I was trying to enter “Top Sites” in the Home page field, I should have paid more attention to what you wrote.
It sure is annoying that the sites move all over the place. I wonder why my Safari behaves differently. Theoretically, once I ‘ve added all the sites I want on Top Sites I should be able to leave it as is. The problem is getting them in place.
i have a problem that i seem to cant find help for.i have no top site listed in the scroll box..just home,blank,and empty. i also have no choice to show or hide top sites in the bookmark tab..so what do i do–its really strange cause at work i have all that and i use the top site page–but at home i have none of that…
So before I understood how to use Top Sites I clicked the x on almost every site, thinking that it would only clear it from the page temporarily for me to input my own. Now I accidentally discarded all of my Top Sites. Is there any way to undo that?
If you go to the settings drop-down menu (looks like a wheel of sorts in the top right corner of the page, right next to a drop-down menu for current page, which looks like a piece of paper) and click on Reset Safari, then uncheck everything except ‘Reset Top Sites’, then click ‘Reset’, it’ll fix that for you.
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