Safari Cookies, Cache and History

When you browse the web Safari will save data as cookies, cache and history. Learn what these are and how to control them.

Video Transcript: Hi,  this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about browser Cookies, Cache, and History. 
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So when you're using a browser like Safari bits of information get stored as you browse the web. These can be broken down into three different things. Cookies, Cache, and History. Now Cookies are bits of information saved by your web browser on your local drive so that when you go back to that same website it can tell the website something about you. Think about it like a bracelet that somebody would get when they go into a hospital. They check in. They get this bracelet that identifies them. That way if they leave or if they move from room to room they don't have to tell whoever they are talking to their entire history. They just look at the bracelet. It identifies them and they know who they are. The same thing with most Cookies. They are just identifying you. For instance here I'm going to log into a website. Now that I've logged in you can see it knows who I am. If I were to close this tab and open it again and go back to the site you can see it still knows who I am. I don't have to login every time I visit a page to this site. The Cookie has saved my identification so now I can browse around from page to page and maybe stay in for a day, a week, a month, or whatever. 
Cookies can also be used for bad things like tracking you from site to site to show you ads. But most of the Cookies you're going to get are actually going to be saving this identifying information. Or it could be something as simple as entering your zip code to get weather information from a site and not having to reenter your zip code every time you visit a page on the site. It knows the previous thing you entered it in because it saved it in a cookie. 
Now another type of data that is saved is the Cache. A Cache lets your browser remember things on a webpage so it doesn't have to redownload them every time. For instance, here I am at the MacMost site. Notice this logo here at the top left. That's a graphic. If I were to go to a new page the same logo is there. It didn't load this logo a second time though. When I visited the first page it saved it to the cache. When I went to the second page it identified that the graphic was the same. So it just pulled it out of the cache. So I can go from page to page to page viewing dozens or hundreds of pages on this site and it won't have to load this graphic again. This significantly speeds up web browsing and it lowers bandwidth costs for you and for the whole internet and servers and everything. 
Now the third type of data is History data. You actually have a History Menu up here and you can look and see the previous pages that you've gone to. You can look through previous days as well. It's also used in places like the Back button. If I click on the Back button, for instance, I can go back several pages. That's all part of your History. So History keeps a list of every place you've been making it easier for you to go back to places. You also can Search like this and you can see that Bookmarks & History, it's going to show you history there. So if you went to a page, say, three days ago and you want to go back now searching is going to be a lot easier because you can look at your History rather than having to simply search the web from scratch again. 
Now that you know about Cookies, Cache, and History the question you might have is do you need to do anything with them. In general, no. You don't have to do anything to maintain them. You should be able to use Safari as normal all the time without ever worrying about one of those things. However, if you want to know how you can clean out some of that, well there is a way. So to get to your Cookies go to Safari, Preferences. Then click on Privacy. In Privacy look for Manage Website Data. Give it a few seconds to load. It's going to show you webpages you may have been to. It's also going to show you some pages where content is loaded up. So you might go to a webpage like Goggle and it may load stuff from this domain as well. Just because you don't recognize something in here doesn't mean that you weren't there. It could be part of a larger site. 
Now, underneath each one of these it will show you things like Cookies and Local Storage. Cache, Cookies, Databases. All of these different things are types of data that we've talked about. Basically all of these are either Cookies or Cache. So there's a lot you can see here if you scroll through this. If you want you can select anyone and then click Remove. It will remove all of the things that are listed there. So it is a way to clear Cookies and also a way to clear Cache, but only for that website. So you can select one or more. You can use Command and Click or you could Click and then use Shift Click to select a range. You could also Search. So say I could search for MacMost or maybe something where several sites will appear. So I could easily pick out a few sites that I want and remove all of that stuff at once. If you haven't searched for anything and you click Remove All it will remove all of the Cookies and Cache for all of these sites. 
Keep in mind there's a big drawback to that. If you're used to being logged into certain websites removing all these Cookies is going to log you out of everything! So every page you go to you'll find yourself logging back in with your ID and password. So it can be a pain. There's a reason why the Cookies are kept around. A good well designed website is using Cookies really well to make your browsing experience better and not to track you. So you don't necessarily want to get rid of everything. 
Now if you just want to get rid of browser Cache you can. The way to do that is to go to Advanced here. Click Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar. Then you get this new menu here and you can Empty Caches. But note this really doesn't do very much. If say your browser Cache is using 2G of storage on your drive you may want to clear that off to get the drive space back. But guess what? Now every time you visit a site it's not going to have the cache of graphics and other elements from those pages. It's going to have to load them again. So it's going to increase your bandwidth use, slow down your viewing of those pages, and the cache will pretty quickly build back up to the same 2G that were there before. 
Now you do have some control over how Cookies are used. If you go back to Privacy you could see Prevent cross-site tracking. That will cutout a lot of cookies of trying to track you from site to site. You could turn off Block All Cookies but that is not recommended because it's going to be very difficult to stay logged into sites and get things done on most popular websites. You may find you may not be able to do anything at all at business sites that you need to work with. 
But note if you want you can always go to a new private window. What a new private window does is it creates almost like another instance of Safari with no Cookies saved at all. So if I were to go back to a site like here notice I'm not logged in. Whereas when I switch to the main window and I go back I'm still logged in here. So the Private window acts as a separate browser. It doesn't have access to the same cookies. Better yet, when I Close this private window any cookies that were saved for use in that private Safari window are now erased. So I can use a private window to log into a site and then simply Close the window and all those saved cookies are gone.
Now what about History. Well, History can be erased using Clear History right here. If I select that you could see I could clear either the Last Hour, Today, Today and Yesterday, or All History. But it does more than just clear this history out. It will also, as you could see, clear website data and cookies. So Clear All History really cleans everything out. It will log you out of websites and it will clear out that cache. It may not be exactly what you want. But the idea is to leave no trace of where you've been. So, of course, anything cached and any cookies that are saved they are going to leave a trace. So it is cleaning everything out. So clearing your History often isn't necessarily a good idea. It's not just getting rid of this browser history here. It's also going to force you to do a lot more to get around on the internet. 
However, if you hold the Option Key down notice Clear History will change to Clear History and Keep Website Data. So this just removes the browsing history. That can be handy if History is getting long and you just want to clear this out. You could also go to Show All History here. Then it lists all your History and if you want you can select something and Delete it. So it can delete single items or Shift Click or Command Click to select a range and delete. You can even select an entire day's worth of things and delete. You could also Search here for something. So I could search for MacMost and it will give me every time I've ever been to a page that has a MacMost in the URL. So you can clear everything out from a single website by doing a search here. 
Note that when you create a new private window anything you do in here, like go from one page to another to another. None of that is going to get added to your history. Notice the Wikipedia page isn't even listed there. So private browsing pages don't effect history although you still can access the history of your regular browsing page in private mode. 
So I hope you learned something from this. But for most people there's no need to ever really deal directly with Cookies, Cache, or History. Certainly use History. It's a useful tool and for the most part leave Cookies and Cache alone unless you have a really good reason to clear them out. For instance, if you're having major issues with your browser and a recommendation to fix it is to clear everything out, then you can certainly give that a try if you're willing to put up with having to log into all sites again and redownload everything that was previously cached.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Safari Cookies, Cache and History”

rod magner

2 years ago

If I clear browser history on my iPad, does that clear it on my Mac and iPhone as well?
Thanks Gary.

Bill Sorensen

I don't want to stay login since maybe that could be used by bad guys. Am I wrong?
I also don't like the fact that I am being tracked all the time. Sometimes I go into website where I am warned about its security. Why would I want to keep that or why would I want other history kept that would reflect badly on me?
Finally, I have Fiber 1000, so I am not seeing much delay getting in and out of websites quickly. I also have autofill mgr. I think my security is more important than quickness?

Gary Rosenzweig

rod: Good question. I don't thin so. But you can experiment and see. Cookies shouldn't, and neither should cache. But maybe history?

Bill: Stay logged in on your device? How do you fear "bad guys" would use that? Not clear on your second or third questions.

Tom Sakaluk

This was an outstanding, informative video for all levels of Mac users. Thanks Gary.

Comments Closed.

Safari Cookies, Cache and History

Comments: 5 Responses to “Safari Cookies, Cache and History”

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