In Safari 5.1, how do I disable Top Sites and the caching of thumbnail images of Web pages?
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.