Top Sites done better on Apple Safari 4
Apple does Top Sites the correct way in Apple Safari 4.
With the many news at its WWDC event yesterday Apple hit a milestone with its Safari browser. Safari 4 Beta was out there for the risk-taking public for a while now to try.
It was pretty impressive in pretty much all the aspects, look and feel, performance, reliability, standards compliance etc. It even adopted a Google Chrome’ish window bar with tabs pushed all the way up to the title bar.
When Apple took Safari 4 out of beta that UI change was gone and it was reverted back to almost the old look. But the performance is pretty impressive (at least with the high-speed FiOS internet connection).
Top Sites is another feature that Apple pretty much took it from Google Chrome but made it better. Instead of a blank look, the Top Sites on Safari have the touch of Apple’s UI magic. It even allows you to edit the top sites so that you can pin your favorite sites so you won’t lose those sites from Top Sites.
Click on the Edit button on the Top Sites page (at bottom left). Safari will put the Top Sites page on Edit mode where you can clear a Site Preview from Top Sites or you can pin a Site Preview so that it stays there for easy access. The blue push-pin indicates that those site previews are pinned. When you close a site preview, another website from your browsing history will show up on the site preview.
If you happen to pin too many websites then you might run into screen real estate issue. After all, by default, Top Sites has only 4×3 site previews. So if you happen to pin too many websites and need more space you can use the “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” tabs at the bottom right of the page to adjust the number of site previews on the Top Sites page.
A “smaller” Top Sites page can display 6×4 = 24 site previews whereas a “medium” Top Sites page can only display 4×3 = 12 site previews. As you must have guessed by now, a “large” Top Sites page can merely display only 3×2 = 6 site previews.
At times, Top Sites “site preview” images might be out of sync, wrong preview or entirely missing. When that happens Apple provides a convenient way to update the site previews with the latest preview images. Just click on the “View” menu and then the “Update Preview Images” option. Safari 4 will take a while to update the preview images and the menu option of “Stop Updating Preview Images” confirms that.
Overall, I feel Apple did add some nice features to the Top Sites concept. It may not be a day-to-day useful feature but certainly can help enhance the browsing experience. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please let us know in comments.
Since Top Sites is a feature that’s pretty much available on most of the recent browsers, which browser, from your perspective, has done the Top Sites better? Please share your thoughts.
Technorati Tags:
Browser, How To, Safari, Safari 4, Top Sites
July 10th, 2009 at 12:34 am
argg, on the top sites it keeps showing me my past history automaticaly and i dont want it too! cause i always have to edit it and get rid of it i only want my top sites there like when i add them, i dont want every single page i go on up there how do i fix it? cause its such a hastle n its getting on my nerves.
July 10th, 2009 at 4:41 am
Jhay – did you pin your favorites on at the Top Sites page? If you have pinned your favorite sites and if there are still room for your everyday sites to show up then you can adjust the Top Sites page size…small, medium and large. I would recommend going for the large with that way you'll end up with only 6 top sites and if all of those are pinned then there won't be room for your everyday sites to show up on at the Top Sites page. I hope it helps.
July 10th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Just out of curiosity, does anyone actually use Top Sites after the first week or so? On any of the browsers? If your tabs are set up properly, Top Sites feels like pointless eye-candy to me.YMMV.