What Types of Data Does Safari Save?
Safari saves the following data to improve your future browsing experience by speeding up page load times, reducing the amount of typing required, and more:
Browsing history: Each time you visit a website, Safari stores a record of the page name and URL. Cache: Speeds up page loads on subsequent visits. The cache includes image files and other web page components. Cookies: Cookies from web servers are stored on your hard drive as small text files. Websites use cookies to customize your browsing experience. Login credentials and other private data are sometimes stored in cookies. Download history: Each time a file downloads through the browser, Safari stores a record containing the file name, size, and the date and time of the download. Local storage: Sites coded with HTML 5 store web application data locally without using cookies.
How to Manage Browser Data in Safari
To manage stored website data on your Mac’s hard drive:
How to Delete the Browsing History on a Mac Hard Drive
To remove browsing history and website data by time period, go to Safari > Clear History and Website Data and choose from one of the following options:
The last hourTodayToday and yesterdayAll history
Automatically Delete History and Other Private Data
You can also instruct the browser to delete browsing data automatically after a specified period of time:
Safari Private Browsing Mode
In Private Browsing mode, your personal data isn’t saved. To activate Private Browsing mode, select File > New Private Window. Alternatively, open a private window in Safari on Mac using the keyboard shortcut Shift+Command+N. When you use the web in a private window, items such as browsing history, cache, cookies, and AutoFill information aren’t stored on your hard drive at the end of a browsing session. If you didn’t designate a window as private, any browsing data accumulated within it is saved on your hard drive. Enabling Private Browsing mode in previous versions of Safari encompassed all open windows and tabs. To determine whether or not a window is private, look at the address bar. If it contains a black background with white text, Private Browsing mode is active in that window. If it contains a white background with dark text, it isn’t enabled.
