Safari for iOS 13 introduced a cool feature that closes tabs automatically for users after a day, week, or month. When helping non-technical users with their phones, I tend to enable this feature which they appreciate since most have hundreds of tabs open at a given time – some admit to even doing the closing manually regularly.
It would be great if Apple added a way for users to have more options for deleting the following data, either manually(selectively) or automatically from their browsers:
- Web browsing history: After a certain amount of time has passed. [Yes, insert joke here].
- Cookies and other data that websites store.
One workaround available today for deleting selective browser history more easily is to delete said data via Safari on macOS if you have the same iCloud account on both devices.
Web browser history is easy to select by date and delete all at once. On iOS, you can only do all via the Settings app or one by one. The Safari history on iOS could add an option to the context menu that deletes “all newer” or “older than” links from the selected one. Here where that could be added here.
Cookies could have two additional options with different potential benefits:
- Deleting based on the date websites were browsed; or
- Deleting based on the time since the user’s last visit to said website.
- Deleting all cookies upon closing a tab.
On macOS, the website cookies and data are not organized by date but in alphabetical order. Which makes selectively deleting items a cumbersome job. Every few months, I periodically delete; all-knowing, I’ll need to log in to a bunch of websites I use regularly. It’s not great, but it works.
Just having better options to do this manually would be a huge win, even if not automatic, since auto-deleting stuff for the user can probably bring tons of unforeseen issues.
Something else I wouldn’t mind managing more easily is past Wi-Fi networks.