Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
page that contains pornography, spam links, phishing code, or even malware. Of course, you make tracks to a
safer neighborhood right away, but that site still lurks in your browser history. To ensure that no one sees the
site in your history and to prevent you (or someone else) from accidentally revisiting the site, you should delete
it from the history.
Follow these steps:
1. In Safari, choose History
→
Show All History to display the history list.
You can also click the Show
All Bookmarks icon on the left side of the Bookmarks Bar and then click History in the Collections pane.
2. Right-click the page you want to remove.
3. Click Delete.
Safari removes the page from the history.
If you don't want any sites or pages to appear in your history, you can clear out the whole thing by choosing
History →Clear History and then clicking Clear when Safari asks you to confirm.
Clearing the browser history is all well and good, but you're just fooling yourself if you think that your brows-
ing activities are now safe from prying eyes. Even a moderately skilled snoop could still find out all about
where you've been by checking your cookies, the Downloads window, Google search entries, and, most import-
antly, the browser's cache of saved site files. You're a wide-open book, my friend.
If you want to close that book, you need to take things a step further and clear everything. Safari calls this reset-
ting the program, and you do it with just a few steps:
1. Choose Safari
→
Reset Safari.
The Reset Safari dialog appears, as shown in Figure 12.15.
12.15
Use the Reset Safari dialog to erase all your browsing tracks.
2. Deselect the options that you do not want Safari to reset.
For maximum privacy, you should select all
the options. However, you might want to deselect the Close all Safari windows option if you plan to contin-
ue using the program.
3. Click Reset.
Safari resets the items you selected.
