How To Clear Search History On Safari

Clear Cache, Cookies and History on Safari

Here are instructions to help you clear your browsing history, cookies & cache in Safari on macOS.

It can be helpful to clear Safari's stored browsing data sometimes if you're having problems with some websites; it provides a bit of a "clean slate" for you; every thing will be reset and you can try again with a fresh browsing setup.

Click the "Safari" menu

Make sure you have a Safari window open and active; you will see the "Safari" menu in the top left of your screen. Click it and it will expand to show Safari specific options.
Click the "Clear History..." item

Now that you have expanded the Safari menu, you will see the Clear History... item - click on it.
Choose what to delete and click "Reset"

Safari now gives you a very simple interface for clearing your browsing history. When you click Clear History your cookies, browsing cache and browser history will be deleted for the specified time range.

If you choose the default option of "all history" then the entire historical record of your browsing on this computer will be deleted. At the top of the prompt, you'll see "Clear: all history" - you can click on this Select field and choose a time range to clear instead.

So instead of deleting all your history, you can choose to just delete Today's browsing history, or just the past hour's history.

Once you have decided how much you want to delete, click the Clear History button.

Congratulations, you have now cleared your selected browsing data from your computer. You can simply close this window and continue to use Safari.

Clearing other saved information from Safari

Clearing your history only removes your browsing history, cache and cookies; if you want to clear various things you've entered into websites you'll need to go to a different part of Safari's settings.

Clearing Form Data and Passwords

On the same Safari Preferences window, click the AutoFill tab along the top. You'll see options for how Safari will automatically "fill out" forms for you online. As well as enabling/disabling it, you can also click the various Edit... buttons which will then show you the various bits of information that Safari has stored.

You can use these interfaces to review and optionally delete any information you've previously entered from your computer. Because some of it is sensitive (Passwords, Credit Card numbers etc) you will have to unlock various sections by entering your computer's password.

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