Whose Top Sites?

April 02, 2009 | David Raffauf

I’m a big fan of Apple design and the simplicity of their products, but I’m not in the “Apple can do no wrong” camp.  I always get a little creeped out when engineers in Cupertino try to tell me what’s most important to me, especially when it comes to websites. 

With the latest release of Safari comes a seemingly cool feature, Top Sites.  They let me view an up-to-date gallery of the sites that I visit most often.  The only problem is there’s no way to permanently remove all those boring sites I have to visit, or recreational sites I don’t want appearing on my Top Sites at work.  Conversely, there are a few sites that I really like but I don’t frequent as often as other boring websites.  Why can’t I choose these sites?

Another akward feature of Top Sites is that they cycle in partner sites for free advertising into your unused slots.  I much preferred Opera’s similar offering, where they allow you to choose which visual bookmarks I want.  I hope that Apple has plans for allowing me to manually pick my top sites in future releases.