Close Tabs in Safari Automatically

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can set Safari to automatically close any open tabs in Safari after a specific period of time. For example, we can set Safari to automatically close any tabs that we haven’t viewed in the last week or the last 30 days. Let’s see how this works. Let’s go to my iPad.

Let’s go and open up Safari here. Now, if we look at this, you’re going to see I have a number of tabs open at the top. I swipe to the left, and we can see we have more tabs. I want to view my open tabs; I go up to the two squares in the upper right-hand corner, tap on it, and now I can see all of my tabs.

If I want to close these, what I need to do is tap on the X in the upper left-hand corner of each tab. But that may take some time. I have to tap on each one of these open tabs if I wanted to close multiple tabs.

Well, also what we can do is, once we tap on done here, we can also go up to these two squares, and instead of just tapping on it, what we do is we long press on it or tap and hold, and then you’re going to see Close All Tabs. In my case, I have 32 tabs open. So if I were to tap on this, it would automatically close all 32 tabs.

Well, we can have the iPad or Safari on the iPad, do this for us automatically. We can have Safari automatically close any tabs that we haven’t viewed in the last day, week, or last month; it will automatically do this. So if I set it for one month, any tab that I haven’t viewed in one month will be closed automatically. So then we no longer have to go in here and manage these manually.

So how do we do that? Well, we need to go to our Settings app. Now I’m going to tap on the Home button, and then we go over to Settings. Under Settings, we need to swipe up on the left side until we find Safari. Under Safari, there’s going to be a section for tabs. And under this section, you’re going to see Close Tabs. Right now, mine is set for manually. So I have to close those individual tabs or separate browser windows manually. Well, if we want to have Safari close them automatically, after a certain period of time, we tap on this, and then we can set when we want Safari to close the tabs automatically.

So I’m going to go for after one month; if I haven’t viewed a tab after a month, in most cases, I’m going to want to close it anyway. There’s no reason for me to have it open on my iPad. So now I tap on this, and now any tab that is over a month old that I have not viewed will automatically be closed.

Now, let’s say it did close a tab, and you want to reopen that tab. We can open up our closed tabs, our recently closed tabs. So let’s say it’s after a month, it automatically closed one of your windows. You want to reopen that window. Well, all you need to do is go back into Safari, so I’m going to tap on the Home button here, and then we go over to Safari. And to open up a recently closed tab, you just go up to the + here, and instead of tapping on it, you long press on it or tap and hold, and you’re going to see Recently Closed Tabs. From here, you just select the tab that was recently closed, and Safari will reopen that web page.

So that’s how we can have Safari automatically close our tabs after a specific period of time if we have now viewed them. To do that, we just go to our Settings app and then go to Safari. In there, you’re going to find a section for tabs. One of the options is for closing the tabs in Safari. Just tap on that and set when you want Safari to automatically close your tabs after they have not been viewed. If you want to open up a tab that Safari recently closed, just open up Safari and then long-press on the +, and you can open up a recently closed tab.

So that’s how we can set Safari to automatically close any tabs after a certain period of time on the iPad.