How to set Apple's Safari default home page

*** BEFORE you do any of the following, it is ALWAYS a good idea to make a COPY of the file you are going to edit ***

1. All files you will need to edit are located in your OWN directory such as...

/Users/YOUR-USER-NAME/Library/Preferences/

What we found in reading many forums is that a lot of people suggest deleting the file "com.apple.Safari.plist", logging out, and then logging back in. But we found that the HOME PAGE setting is NOT found ANYWHERE in this file! At least not in OS 10.4 Tiger.

2. Instead, we had to OPEN the following two files in a simple text editor (we used BBEdit after making copies of them of course). We edited the files WITHOUT the word "copy" in their name...

com.apple.internetconfig.plist
com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist

3. You need to do a simple FIND function. Like in the file menu at the top of the program window, FIND, or EDIT, or SEARCH. You are looking for what the home page is currently pulling up. Such as "www.apple.com/startpage" or in our case "www.whynotdesign.com"

4. Once you have found that text in your simple text editor, you need to CHANGE it to what you want it to be in BOTH files! We changed ours to "www.whynotdomains.com"

5. Close both files and SAVE them. MAKE SURE they are the same name as the original file names, because when you LOG OUT, and then back in and relaunch Safari it will look for these file names. It will NOT look for the files with the word "copy" in them.

6. Log out of Mac OS X, and then log in again. Relaunch Safari and you should be good to go :-)

7. If for some reason it doesn't work and you get the www.apple.com/startpage/ - check those two files again and make sure it saved what you typed in those two text files.

...If it didn't keep your setting, but came up with www.apple.com/startpage/ then you have two options.

7a. Go to the URL or web site you want to have as your homepage, then go to the file menu in Safari and select, Safari > Preferences > General > Set to Current Page. Close the Preferences window. Quit Safari and relaunch the Safari program. This should do it.

7b. If the above did not work, you can go back to step 2 above, but now you will SEARCH for www.apple.com/startpage/ in those two files, and change the text to go to where you want it to go. Then continue on to step 6 again.

We were able to get option 7a to work, but in either case, you should be taken back to the default homepage as set by Apple, and you should then be able to force it to do your will.

We really hope this has helped SOMEONE :-)

If it has please drop us a note at