Safari has some innovative privacy features. First, it’s possible to easily erase Safari’s entire browsing history by clicking on History > Clear History. Safari can also be reset by clicking on Safari > Reset Safari. In Safari 3, it’s possible to choose individual features to reset in Safari, such as “Clear Google Searches,” or “Empty the cache.” These are useful options, but what if you only want to remove one or two webpages from your browsing history?
I know what you’re probably thinking. “What kind of creep needs to hide their web browsing history?” Besides looking at naughty images, there actually are good reasons for removing a webpage from your browsing history. Maybe you’re researching a medical condition you’d like to keep private. Perhaps you’re gift shopping and don’t want someone to ruin their birthday surprise. Or more likely, you opened a page with questionable content by accident, and you’d like to remove it from your history.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to do this. In Safari, click on History > Show All History. Alternately, you can click on the bookmark icon in Safari’s upper left corner, under the back / forward arrows and browse down the list to the “History” header.
Once you’re looking at the list of web pages you’ve viewed, you can simply go down the list, click once on the page title, then click delete. The individual page will be removed from Safari’s history.
Note that you can choose to Browse Privately with Safari so you don’t need to go back and purge your history. Simply launch Safari, then click Safari > Private Browsing. In this mode, Safari won’t save any cookies, passwords, or pages viewed.