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.

Get Safari Cleaner (direct download)