In Safari 5.1, how do I disable Top Sites and the caching of thumbnail images of Web pages? There were methods for doing this in earlier versions of Safari but I don't know of one that works with 5.1.

The reason I want to do this is that it takes up a great deal of disk space, and I suspect it slows things down on my older, slower Mac running Lion because of all the extra caching going on. I never use the feature anyway.

Here is the link to an earlier question on Ask Different with regard to Safari 5.0.

How can I disable &quot;Top Sites&quot; in Safari/Webkit completely?

I am creating a new question because apparently any methods that would work for Safari 5.0 will not work for 5.1.
While not a clean solution and not properly preventing Safari from creating the thumbnails in the first place, this apparently works to keep them from taking up disk space:

rm ~/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db &amp;&amp; ln -s /dev/null ~/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db


Incidentally, even going to Safari → Reset Safari… and ticking Remove all webpage preview images will apparently leave this hack intact.

As for Top Sites, there are a few places you can remove it from:


Safari → Preferences → General → New windows open with
Safari → Preferences → General → New tabs open with
Safari → Preferences → Bookmarks → Bookmarks bar


I don't believe the menu item can be removed this easily.