OS X Safari: Wiping Your History, on Schedule

If you’re an über-paranoid—um, I mean, person with good sense like me, you’ll want to clear your Mac’s browsing history occasionally. Of course, there’s a widespread joke that a good friend is one who’d wipe it for you if you ever died unexpectedly, but I just can’t depend on that. I don’t want anyone knowing how often I search for “Jony Ive swimsuit pics,” you understand.

Fortunately, Safari will let us configure how long we’d like to keep our browsing history, and it’s simple to change. To do so, open Safari and start by clicking on the “Safari” menu in the upper-left. Choose “Preferences” from the list:

Safari Preferences menuWhen the subsequent window opens, click on the “General” tab. One of the options there is labeled “Remove history items.”

Remove history items settingsAs you can see, I’ve got mine set to delete stuff after one week, so selecting Safari’s “History” menu will only show my Jony Ive searches going back that far:

Safari browser history

But if you’d prefer, you can choose any of the other options from that Safari > Preferences > General drop-down, including having your items removed after just one day.

If you need to have your history wiped every single day, though, I’d suggest you consider using Private Browsing (which is available under File > New Private Window in Safari or by pressing Shift-Command-N). I’d also wonder whether you were a spy, but as fun as that sounds, that’s probably not the reason why most of us need history items removed, is it?