Browsing history is a record of every webpage you visit. Your browser stores the URLs for every page, except when you use private browsing mode. Browsing history can help improve your browsing experience (e.g. as you start typing a URL in the address bar of your browser, previously visited URLs display in a dropdown list that match what you're typing), but it also exposes your browsing habits. If other people use your Mac from time to time, or you get family members looking over your shoulder as you surf the web, you may want to delete your browsing history on a regular basis.
You can manually clear your browsing history in Safari at any time. Two of the ways to clear all your browser history are:
• Choose "Clear History" from the Safari application menu
• Choose "Clear History" from the History menu
but be aware that the name "Clear History" is misleading. Clicking "Clear History" also deletes other website data, like cookies and the entire browser cache. However, there is a way to clear your browsing history without losing website data.
Simply choose the Safari or History menu, but press and hold down the Option key before selecting the "Clear History" option. You'll see the option change to "Clear History and Keep Website Data". Keep the Option key pressed and select that option.
Whether you’re for example browsing Amazon and have opened a bunch of product tabs that you need to share via Messages or have several tabs open for your research work that you want to add to your document, you can simplify this process by copying all open website addresses in one go. As a result, you won’t have to manually copy each open link, paste it, and then repeat this process back and forth for the remaining tabs. A couple of clicks and all open URLs will be copied to your device’s clipboard for pasting into other apps.
• Make sure you have the relevant tabs open on Safari
• Click the sidebar icon in the top left corner of the window or press the Shift+Command+L to show the sidebar
• Right-click over the profile or Tab Group name and choose Copy Links, all URLs of open tabs will be copied to your Mac’s clipboard
Now go to Notes, Messages, Mail, Pages, Word, or another app, and paste the links there. When using Command+V to paste in an app that supports rich formatting, you’ll notice that the website name with the URL linked to it is pasted. But if you use Command+Option+Shift+V to paste without formatting, or paste them normally in an app like Messages, you’ll have both the website name and the full URL in plain text.
This is particularly helpful if you use a third-party password manager or prefer managing your login credentials manually.
• Open the Passwords app
• Choose Passwords > Settings in the top menu bar, then authenticate with Touch ID or your computer password
• Uncheck Suggest Strong Password
You’ll no longer get suggestions in Safari to create a new password (and save it to the Passwords app) when you’re signing up for a new account on a website or changing the password of an existing website. But you should still see a tiny key icon in the password field, which you can click to generate a new password. If you don’t want to see even the tiny key icon in the password field to use the Passwords app, go to Safari settings > AutoFill and uncheck the box for "User names and passwords".
The latest versions of Safari use an aggressive tinting feature by default that changes the color the Safari window and titlebars to whatever color is detected on the top of a particular webpage. This can cause some visually jarring experiences when browsing the web, and if the colorful windows and titlebar experience is not something you like, you’ll be happy to know that you can easily turn the Safari color tinting feature off.
Color tinting in the Safari titlebars and window bars is not a new feature, but even if you had it disabled on prior versions of Safari, if you recently upgraded to macOS Tahoe you will likely find this feature has enabled itself again automatically, and thus you need to disable it again.
If you are tired of the garish color changing of the window titlebars, here’s how to disable that:
• From Safari, pull down the ‘Safari’ menu and choose “Settings...”
• Go to “Tabs”
• Uncheck the box for “Show color in tab bar”
The change takes effect immediately.
Some Mac users have content blockers installed into Safari, which are designed to prevent a part of a webpage from loading, things like preventing a remote javascript that tracks cookies or loads ads, or something that places a cookie into your browser, etc. However, content blockers can cause interference with certain webpages, and it’s not unusual for content blockers to completely break a website or webpage from functioning.
Problems with content blockers are particularly common with finance and banking sites, wi-fi captive portals, and video sharing sites, so you may find yourself wanting to disable content blockers for a specific site as you browse the web in Safari on your Mac.
It’s not unusual to need to disable content blockers for certain websites to work properly, so here’s how to do that:
• Navigate to the site you want to disable content blockers for in Safari on the Mac
• After the webpage has loaded, right-click on the website URL in the address bar, and choose “Settings for DomainName.com”
• Uncheck the box next to “Enable content blockers” to disable content blockers for this particular domain
• Refresh the webpage, and content blockers will now be disabled
Notice that you can even change other settings for a specific website in the same popup window.
With the content blockers disabled, the website should now load and function as intended. There are also sites that you choose to not run content blockers on for other reasons, maybe so they function properly, maybe to support them, or maybe to even load them at all, since there are some examples where content blockers prevent a site from accessible at all.
