Set Safari's Activity window to have items collapsed by default

Jun 29, '12 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: quinntaylor

The Activity window can be extremely useful for quickly finding resources for a web page, identifying which ones failed to load, etc. However, with a lot of pages open, it often shows too much information by default, as each web page's disclosure triangle is expanded. This takes longer to view the page and requires you to scroll to find the site you want to check, if you have multiple windows or tabs open. Fortunately, Safari has a setting that controls this behavior, although it isn't accessible via the GUI.

Simply type the following in Terminal to make the Activity window open with all sites collapsed by default:

defaults write com.apple.Safari ActivitiesStartExpanded -boolean NO
Quit and relaunch Safari for this to take effect.

To reverse the setting, simply invert the last argument:
defaults write com.apple.Safari ActivitiesStartExpanded -boolean YES

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