So I came across something weird that's affected only my 10.12.4 clients (none of my 10.11.6 clients seem to be affected by this). Even though I have only one Safari profile enabled, which is set-once and doesn't manage the homepage, my 10.12.4 clients are unable to change the homepage in Safari manually. Whatever the homepage was is stuck like that. If you enter a new homepage in the Safari preferences, it will just not take and revert back to the old homepage once you hit Enter or click out of the address entry field.
The only workaround I've found for this is to delete all profiles (again, even though I don't have any profiles managing the Safari homepage):
Are you sure you want to delete all configuration profiles? [y/n]:y
Also, after testing on a couple of other clients, there do seem to be situations in which the Safari profile was never set at all, and you still can't modify the homepage, even after deleting any other profiles and rebooting, and it's not account-specific either (freshly created account experiences it, too). It's a real head-scratcher.
Just a thought, is there safari related content in the /Library/Managed Preferences folder for the machines without profile installed?
Nope. Nothing Safari-related in there.
I’m experiencing the same thing suddenly.
I need to test more to confirm, but so far it’s limited to Open Directory accounts. Local user accounts are fine.
I noticed this after upgrading my OS X Server box to Sierra from El Capitan. Profile Manager had never been turned on until I did so just now to see if I could find something lurking in there. Nothing found.
I use JAMF Pro, but I’m seeing this with boxes not enrolled in either JAMF Pro or any MDM.
The sudo profiles -D command did not fix it.
Hi guys, I’ve been battling with this for awhile now and it’s driving me insane. At first I thought there was something wrong with my image so I ended up formatting a drive and reinstalling macOS from the recovery partition. A fresh copy of macOS was downloaded from Apple. Once I went through the welcome/setup screens, I launched Safari and tried to change the homepage. It won’t let me do it. I’ve noticed this on 10.12.5 and 10.12.6. I’m chalking it up to a bug at this point.
Hi guys, I had exactly the same problem, called Apple, and eventually found a fix that works for me:
Restart in Safe mode (restart with the Shift key pressed)
Once restarted, go to Safari preferences and change the homepage. This time, the address should stick and NOT revert back to the Apple website.
Close Safari Preferences window.
Restart the mac.
Now the homepage address in Safari should be the one you set.
W0rked for me.
Good luck.
iMac with OS Sierra 10.12.6, 4.2 GHz Intel Core i7
Someone on the Mac admins Slack posted this solution, but I haven’t had a chance to try it or Laurent’s yet:
* In Safari, choose Preferences from the Safari menu.
* In the window that opens, click the General icon (if necessary)
* Enter your desired home page in the “Homepage” field, but DO NOT press return!
* At the top of the window, click any of the other icons (eg, Tabs, AutoFill, etc).
* You may see a prompt asking for confirmation for changing the home page. If so, confirm.
* Switch back to the General page and check to make sure the home page has been changed.
That worked for me! Thank you!
Worked for me. Thank you! This was driving me nuts.
Worked for me as well! Man this was driving me nuts!!! THANK YOU!
Yep, I found out about this one after banging my head trying to figure out why an almost instinctual behavior of “type what you want and hit enter” ceased working. Not sure who thought it makes sense that changing tabs or closing the Safari preferences window is allowed, from a UX standpoint, to substitute for hitting ENTER or a Save button.
That did the trick!
Thank you!