Disable Safari 4 Beta's Top Sites web page previews

Apr 20, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

In Safari 4 Beta, the Top Sites page displays thumbnails of your top sites. This feature can take a lot of disk space; if you'd like to use Top Sites, but disable the thumbnails completely (as opposed to just disabling their updates, which you can do via Safari's menus), here's how.

Quit Safari, open Terminal (in Applications » Utilities), and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy -int 2
Relaunch Safari, and it will no longer create snapshots of pages you visit.

[robg adds: I tested this, and it works. However, to really take advantage of it, you'll also want to delete the existing snapshots from your drive. The easy way is to use Safari -> Reset Safari, and leave only 'Remove all webpage preview images' checked, then click Reset.

If you delete all the existing previews and implement this hint, you'll see a generic placeholder for each page on the Top Sites screen. To get your previews back, quit Safari, and run this command in Terminal: defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSnapshotsUpdatePolicy. You won't see new previews until you visit each site on the Top Sites at least once.]

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