Clear your History

In this video, I will show you how you can clear your browsing history in Safari on the Mac. This is a great troubleshooting tip. If you’re having a problem with a website, when you clear your browsing history, you can select how far back you want to go or how far back you want to clear it, and when you do clear it, it does clear your history of the web pages you visited as well as any cookies. Let’s see how we clear our history in Safari. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s first discuss what happens when you browse around your website. What your Mac will do, as you’re browsing around different websites, is it’ll keep a history of those websites. It’ll keep a history of any pages that you visited. This way, what you’re able to do easily is go back to a previous page or a previous website through your history.

Also, what your Mac does is stores related data to that website in a cookie. This cookie is only stored on your Mac, but it’s an essential part of browsing around the web. Cookies are how websites keep track of your shopping cart; cookies are how websites keep track of if you are logged in. My site uses cookies. These cookies are not shared among other websites. All they are used for is just internal. I am keeping track of if you are logged in, or as I said, keeping track of what you have in your shopping cart.

Now, this history and cookies can cause problems. When you go to a website, and it crashes, one of the first things you may want to try, if you can’t get to that website, is deleting your history and cookies. So how do we do that? Well, it’s pretty simple in Safari to do that.

All we have to do is just go up under Safari in the menu bar. And you’re going to see Clear History. When I select this, I get a new window that opens up, and from here, I can select how far back I want to clear. Now, if this is just a recent website that you’re having a problem with, you may only have to go back to the last hour. So then all of that other history from previous days is still going to be there. It’s only going to erase your history, your cookies from the last hour.

Now, if you’ve had problems with this website for a while now, what you may want to do is select to go further back. Maybe you want to go back to today and yesterday. All you do is just select this and then click Clear History. When you do that, it’s going to remove all of your history and cookies from today and yesterday.

Now I said all. It is not just for the one website that you are on. If I were to select Today and Yesterday here and Clear History, not only will it clear the cookies and history from Dan’s Tutorials, but it’s going to do it for every other website that I visited for today and yesterday. I’ll be able to go back further, but I will not have any cookies or any history from today or yesterday. So it doesn’t do this just for a single website; it does it for all of your websites that you visited with Safari, and as I said, what’ll happen then when you go back to that website, in most cases, you’ll be able to visit that website, and it’ll work properly. This is a good troubleshooting tip.

So that’s how you clear your cookies, as well as your history on the Mac. All you have to do is just go to Clear History under Safari in the menu bar. You’ll have a new window that opens up, and then from there, you’ll be able to select how far back you want to clear history. When you do clear history, it does clear history as well as related cookies and other data.

So that’s how you can clear history as well as any related cookies on the Mac.