How to Clear Only Recent History in Safari 8 in Yosemite

Safari has long had the "Clear History" option, but it is a nuclear option. All of your…well, history, is obliterated. It's a pretty serious method of troubleshooting any sort of web browser funkiness that could be causing issues in Safari.

Luckily there are more options for history in Safari these days, so if something has come up in the last hour, or just "recently," you can now eliminate that history without destroying all the rest. In Safari 8.0.5, go to History > Clear History and Website Data… at the bottom of the history menu:

Safari History MenuHistory menu. Make sure to look wayyyyy down at the bottom for this option.

Once you select that from the very bottom of the history menu (which might be a long menu), a dialog box pops up to ask how much deleting you want to do:

Safari clear history dialogClear History. How long? It's up to you.

Your options are the last hour, today, today and yesterday, and all history. This way if you know it was recently, you can safely eliminate the last little while, or if you need to nuke your entire history from a low orbit, you still have that option as well.

Now if you have to clear your browser history for some reason, you can at least preserve some portion of it which is handy for autocompleting web addresses and pulling up previous web searches.