How to Clear Search History on Safari on macOS Big Sur

You can delete all records that Safari holds from where you’ve been browsing during the time you want. If your Mac and other computers are switched on by Safari in iCloud settings, the history of your browsing will be deleted. The removal of your Safari browsing history would not clear any browsing history that the websites you visited hold separately. In this guide, you will learn how to clear search history on Safari in macOS Big Sur while keeping cookies and other web data on Mac.

Meanwhile, The Safari browser has a secret history clearing feature that allows Mac users to clear their Safari web browser history while retaining other website and site cookies from the same time frame. In other words, this may be used to delete the web browsing history of visiting specific web sites, while retaining the username and other cookie information of the web pages accessed. This is a valuable option, in comparison to Safari’s default browser history clearing option for Mac OS, which clears all web history and also removes website data and cookies.

When you clear your history, Safari removes data it saves as a result of your browsing, including:

History of webpages you visited
The back and forward list for open webpages
Frequently visited site list
Recent searches
Icons for webpages
Snapshots saved for open webpages
List of items you downloaded (downloaded files aren’t removed)
Websites added for Quick Website Search
Websites that asked to use your location
Websites that asked to send you notifications

How to Clear Search History on Safari on macOS Big Sur

Clearing Safari Browsing History on Mac is a good idea, as it will help protect your privacy against those seeking to find your browsing habits and the websites you access. Below are the steps to clear Safari Browsing History on Mac.

So, without further ado, here’s how to clear search history on Safari in macOS Big Sur:

Open the Safari app.
Now, hold down the OPTION key and then click the Safari menu, you’ll see Clear History and Keep Website Data instead of Clear History. Select Clear History and Keep Website Data.

At the Clearing will only remove browsing history, but will keep other web browsing data window, choose from clearing the last hour, today, today and yesterday, or all history.

Click on the Clear History button. Just as described, the web history will be cleared out from Safari on the Mac, but the cookies will remain intact from that time period.

In Safari for Mac, this is a less detailed option to clear all metadata and all page data, but it can be desirable for certain cases where a user needs to clear the clearly accessible browser history in Safari itself, while also keeping cookies and saving data for certain websites that were accessed in the time period. Separately, you may want to clear up recent searches made in Safari that pop-up in the URL bar as well, or whether you might delete a particular cookie, but not all of them from the previous browsing session.

Final Words

This is how you can clear search history on the Safari web browser on your macOS Big Sur. This is helpful if you want to clear the Safari web history without clearing cache and other web data.

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