Close Open Tabs Automatically

In this video, we’re going to look at how it can have Safari automatically close any tabs that have not been viewed after a day, after one week, or even after a month on the iPhone. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my iPhone.

Now the way that Safari on the iPhone handles browser windows, multiple browser windows, it does this through tabs. Let’s go and open up Safari here. If I want to open up a different browser window, what I do is I go over to these two squares in the lower right-hand corner. This is where I can view all of my open windows or, in Safari’s case, here on the iPhone; these are all of my different tabs. So we can see, we have several tabs open here. This is how we handle multiple browser windows in Safari. We do this through these tabs.

Now, if you haven’t closed out these tabs, you might find that you have a lot of different tabs open. One way of closing them is by tapping on the X in the upper left-hand corner of each tab. But if you have a lot of tab windows open, this may take a while. You can also swipe over to the left on any one of these; I swipe over to the left and closes it. Again, if you have a lot of tabs open, that could take a while.

Well, there’s a little trick to close all of your tabs. All you have to do is tap on Done here, and then we go back over to our two squares, and we tap and hold on it. From there you’re going to see Close All Tabs. In my case, I have 37 tabs open. If I tap on this, it’ll close them all. I’ll only have one tab open. So those are the different ways to close your tabs.

But the problem with this is you have to do it manually. Well, the good news is you can have your iPhone automatically close any tabs after a week, after a month, or even after a day. So you no longer have to go in here and close these manually.

So how do we do that? Well, we need to go to our Settings app. So I’m going to tap outside here, and now I swipe up from the bottom, and we go over to our Settings app. From here, what we need to do is go to Safari. You may have to swipe up to find this. I tap on it, and now when I swipe up, you’re going to see we have a section here for tabs. One of the options for our tabs is to close the tabs, and we can see that minus set manually. So the only way on my iPhone, the way that those tabs are going to close in Safari, is if I manually close them. When I tap on this, what I’m able to do is set how often I want them to be closed. So let’s go after one month. Any tab that I have not viewed after one month will be closed. I think this is pretty safe. I tap on it. And now, when I go back to Safari, any tabs that I haven’t viewed in a month are going to be closed automatically. So this is the way that you can manage all of those open tabs. They’ll close them automatically.

Now, let’s say that it closed a tab automatically, and you want to reopen that tab? Well, we can do that as well. If I go back over to Safari here, we tap on our tabs here to see all of our open tabs. If I go over to the + here and tap on it, it will open up a new tab. That’s not what I want to do. I want to open up a recently closed tab. To do that, we tap and hold on to it. And then, from here, we can see all of my recently closed taps. So from here, all I have to do is tap on any one of these links, and it’ll open it up.

So that’s how we can have Safari on the iPhone automatically close our tabs after one day, one week, or even one month, as well as how we can open up a recently closed tab. To do that, we go over to our Settings app, and then we go to Safari. There’s going to be a section for tabs, with an option to set how soon you want your iPhone or Safari on the iPhone to close any tabs in Safari. It will only close the tabs that you haven’t viewed in the time period that you specify.

So that’s how we can have Safari automatically close any tabs that we haven’t viewed for a specific period of time on the iPhone.