If you’re a Mac user, you know that Safari can be a bit of a mess when it comes to cleaning your browsing history. You have to remember to clear your history every time you start Safari, or else it’ll keep track of all the websites and pages you’ve visited over the past few months. But there’s an easier way to do this in Safari on Mac: just use the “Wipe browsing history” feature. This will erase all the websites and pages that you’ve visited in the past few months, so you won’t have any trouble remembering where you left off. To use this feature, open Safari and click on the three lines in the top left corner of your screen. This will show a list of all the websites and pages that are currently open in Safari. On the right side of this list, you’ll see a box that says “Wipe browsing history.” Click on this box to start wiping your browsing history. When Safari finishes wiping your history, it’ll show you a list of all the websites and pages that were erased. You can now reopen these sites and pages by clicking on them again or by using another browser window or app.
Your browser records all your web activity. Therefore, for added privacy, it’s best to regularly clear your browsing history. Safari on your Mac can take care of this for you and automatically wipe your history every once in a while. Here’s how to set it up.
Launch Safari on your Mac from the Launchpad or by looking it up on Spotlight.
Next, click “Safari” from the left corner of the menu bar and select “Preferences.” Alternatively, you can press Cmd+comma on your keyboard to head directly into this menu.
Under the “General” tab, locate the “Remove History Items” option.
From the dropdown beside it, you can select how often Safari should delete your browsing history. You can have it cleared as frequently as every day or every year.
When you enable this setting, Safari automatically wipes logs of the websites you visit, your web searches, and more.
If you prefer reviewing your browsing history before clearing it, you can choose “Manually” from the dropdown and periodically erase your web activity from Safari yourself.
At the bottom of the “General” section, you’ll also find a separate setting called “Remove download list items.” With this option, you can configure Safari to automatically remove the list of files you downloaded (but not the files themselves).
You can have them wiped after a day, as soon as you quit Safari, or when the download is unsuccessful.
Enabling these won’t affect your Safari browsing data on other Apple devices such as an iPhone or an iPad. As of yet, the options to automatically wipe your browsing history and the download list are not available on Safari’s iOS and iPadOS apps.
There’s a lot more you can do for a more secure experience on Safari, including browsing in incognito mode by default and optimizing it for maximum privacy.
