Clear browser history, cookies and recent items on your Mac

Clearing browser history on a Mac with more than one browser

Every browser keeps its own history, cookies and cache, and each one hides the setting to clear them somewhere different. If you use Safari for some things, Chrome for work and Firefox now and then, clearing your browsing history means doing it three times, once per profile. And macOS keeps its own trail on top of that: the documents, apps and servers you opened recently.

Privacy Cleanup finds all of it in one pass and lists it by browser and profile, with the size of each item, so you can see what is there and tick what should go.

What it clears, browser by browser

Firefox's history isn't offered. Firefox keeps your history and your bookmarks in the same file, so removing one would remove the other. Clear Firefox's history from Firefox itself, with Clear Recent History.

Cookies and Chromium form data start unticked. Deleting cookies signs you out of every site in that browser, and in Chrome-based browsers the form data file also holds your saved addresses, payment cards and search engines. Tick them when that is what you want, and Tidy My Mac says so again before it clears them.

Clear recent items on Mac

The macOS group covers the traces your Mac keeps outside the browser:

• Recent Items: the recent documents, apps and servers in the Apple menu, and the documents in each app's Open Recent menu.
• Finder Recent Folders: the list in Finder's Go → Recent Folders menu. It disappears the next time Finder restarts.
• Quick Look Thumbnails: the previews macOS keeps of files you looked at with Quick Look.

Saved passwords and bookmarks are never touched

Tidy My Mac doesn't edit a browser's databases row by row. It moves whole files to the Trash, together with the journal files that belong to them, so a browser never opens a half-edited database, and you can put them back.

Everything goes to the Trash first

Cleared history, cookies and caches move to the Trash and into the cleanup history on the Dashboard, where Put Back restores them. Finder's recent folders and the Quick Look thumbnails are the exception: they are cleared outright, and Tidy My Mac tells you before it does.

A browser that is open keeps these files in use and writes them back when it quits, so a running browser's items are greyed out. Use the Quit button beside it, which asks the browser to quit as if you chose Quit from its menu, then clear.

A note on sync

If your browser syncs with an account (Chrome, Firefox, or Safari with iCloud), the history may come back from the cloud after you clear it on this Mac. To keep it gone, turn off history sync in the browser's settings, or clear it there as well.

Full Disk Access

macOS protects Safari's data and the recent items lists. Without Full Disk Access, Privacy Cleanup can't see them and says so; the other browsers are listed either way. The Privacy Policy describes what the app reads on your Mac. None of it is sent anywhere.