hundreds of yahoo pages

[confused of chalus]

Can anyone help me? I have an Apple desktop operating safari. That's about as technical as I can get! Over the past week or so when I access 'top sites' yahoo france comes up on the whole screen. Tonight, trying to clear some tabs i discovered countless yahoo tabs all full page, blank. I have spent ages deleting about a hundred of them, but they just keep coming!

What is happening, and how can i get rid of them?

Answers in words of one syllable please!

[Tancrède]

[quote user="confused of chalus"]I have spent ages deleting about a hundred of them, but they just keep coming![/quote]

There is no point in trying to delete this load of clutter piece by piece.  Simply Quit Safari, and get rid of it all in one go.  Viz. go to Safari on the bar at the top, and select 'Quit', from the drop-down menu, and click it.

If there are several windows open with loads of tabs, it will say :  Do you really want to close all these tabs etc. ?  Say :  Yes.

You now re-open Safari by clicking its icon on the dock at the bottom (perhaps) of your screen.

[quote user="confused of chalus"]when I access 'top sites' yahoo france comes up on

the whole screen.[/quote]

The 'Top Sites' facility if you use it (and you are not obliged to), is generated by your own browsing history.  For some reason it believes that you have a particular yen for Yahoo.

So go to 'History' in the bar at the top and consult the drop down menu.  You will be able to see the various addresses that you have visited, today, yesterday, the day before, etc. etc.  Conceivably this will give you a clue as to when and how this problem started.

At all events, click 'Delete History' at the bottom of the drop-down menu.  Since there is now no browsing history, a new 'Top Sites' pages will have nothing to offer.  Give it a try and see what you get.

Now go to 'Safari' in the bar at the top.  Select 'Preferences' from the drop-down menu.  Select 'General'.  This will tell you what you are asking Safari to do in respect of opening new windows etc.

Mine says :

'Default search engine'  -  Google.  Since it is Yahoo that is giving you grief, I suggest that you change this setting from Yahoo to Google  -  at least as an experiment to see what happens.

'New windows open with…'   I suggest you chose here 'Top Sites' (since this is obviously a facility that you use).  Make sure it is not set to 'Empty Page', since this seems to be what you have been getting too much of.

'New tabs open with…'  You may well want 'Top Sites' here too.

Now return to your Safari page, and see what happens.  Navigate to a few favoured sites in order to build up a bit of 'History', and see if these visits prompt a suitable change in 'Top Sites'.  Whilst this delicate experiment is proceeding, use Google, and do not use Yahoo.

[confused of chalus]

Thank you so much gengulphus, for taking the time to do a step by step guide. So far so good, and all the pages have gone! A big chunk of memory has been freed up too.

I really don't understand how the problem arose as we don't use yahoo France much, if at all, but your fix seems to have worked. I had expected top sites to come up empty, but everything, including this forum stayed the same.

I think I will just carry on as normal now and see if it happens again.

Kathy