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how to clear Safari’s cookies on quit
Posted by philastokes
If ever there was a free app that deserved more recognition, it’s Safari Cleaner (direct download). Developed out of a simple applescript, this app does what many people would expect Safari to have an option to do in the Preferences panels: automatically clear stored information when Safari quits.
Personally, I’ve found this particularly needsome since signing into any Google service seems to be particularly irritating. Gmail, for example, needs several clicks just to be told that you don’t want to be remembered. Safari Cleaner takes care of automatically ‘forgetting’ as much or as little info as you want without you having to remember to clear cookies or caches. It’ll also, thankfully, forget Top Sites.
Personally, I leave my history as that’s something I regularly need across sessions, but the rest, I’m happy to be forgotten. If you’re wondering why anyone might care, well, there’s a whole bunch of reasons including protecting you from malware and malicious websites, but at least one other is nicely detailed in this Ars Technica article, which explains how cookies can be used to track your physical whereabouts.
One caveat to note with Safari Cleaner: in my tests, I’ve noticed that if you click and restart Safari in rapid succession (within about 5 seconds or less), the script hasn’t had time to complete running and caches and cookies aren’t cleared. To be safe, you probably want a nice 10 secs or so between quitting and relaunching Safari if you absolutely must be sure the previous session was wiped out.
Once you’ve run and set up Safari Cleaner’s options, you can quit the app and it’ll just carry on working in the background. Launch the app only if you want to change your options. If you want to uninstall it, note that there’s an uninstaller in the DMG, so don’t throw that away.
how to empty caches in Safari 6
Posted by philastokes
Since the old ‘Empty Cache…’ item has gone missing in the main menu in Safari 6.0, you might be thinking this function has been removed. Actually, its still there, but is somewhat hidden.
Go to
Safari > Preferences > Advanced
and check the Show Develop menu in menubar button at the bottom.
In Safari’s menu bar, choose Develop > Empty Caches.
Alternatively, you can just use the keyboard shortcut
option-command-E
Don’t forget you also have quite a lot of flexibility by unchecking or checking different options in
Safari > Reset Safari
For example, you can clear just the cookie cache by unselecting everything except ‘Remove website data’ (this can also be achieved in the Privacy tab in Safari Preferences, too). 🙂
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FastTasks – a free utility from Applehelpwriter
Posted in Mountain Lion, Safari 6.0
Tags: cache, caches, clean, clear, cookies, delete, empty, item, menu, missing, Mountain Lion, remove, Safari, website data