Advertisement It’s normal for macOS to use some of your hard drive space for everyday operations. Your web browser constantly downloads new data, which it retains to speed up future browsing sessions. Applications like video editors and iTunes keep a media cache of exported files and album artwork. It’s amazing just how much by deleting junk files, provided you know where to look.

There’s also good reason to approach this reclamation of drive space with caution. Today we’ll look at why and how to clear caches on macOS, as well as a few apps that make it super easy. What Are Caches and Why Delete Them? Caches are basically temporary files created by your operating system and the applications you use. They could be temporary internet files like images and HTML documents, created by a web browser like Safari or Chrome.

If you edit a lot of photos and videos, you’ll find that your editor of choice retains temporary data that hangs around on your drive. Video editors that render clips and effects during editing have to store this data somewhere, but they don’t always remove these files afterwards.

Many applications keep caches that are just too small to worry about. System components like Spotlight, Contacts, and Maps create relatively lightweight caches that won’t net you a lot of free space should you delete them. Which brings us to an important point: you don’t need to delete caches. Unless you’re looking for a quick and easy way to regain some free space and you’re constantly juggling applications and files so that your Mac functions normally, it’s best to leave them be. Many applications run their own cleanup routines to stop caches ballooning to unmanageable sizes. There are a few other valid reasons you might delete caches beyond a desire for more space.

Enter The Room From Safari For Macbook

Fix problems with webpages loading outdated assets. Remove personal data stored by websites and applications. Force an app to discard old cached information. Important: Create a Backup First! You should already be regularly backing up your Mac, whether that’s with the, using a There are lots of Mac backup options out there, and many of them have features that Apple's default backup app just can't compete with., or even Time Machine is a great first line of defence, but the best way to keep your files safe is to use an off-site backup. When you start poking around in the Library folder, you run the risk of breaking something.

While most applications generally won’t store critical information in the cache, it’s certainly possible that deleting something could lead to unwanted data loss and unforeseen behavior. With a recent backup, you can simply should something go wrong. How to Clear the Safari Cache on Mac. Clearing your web cache is easy, though if you’re, this won’t be of use to you:. Launch Safari and click on Safari Preferences at the top of the screen. Click on Advanced then enable Show Develop menu in menu bar at the bottom. Close the Preferences window then select Develop at the top of the screen.

From the Develop menu choose Empty Caches. Note: This is a bit more drastic than simply clearing your history, accessible under Safari Clear History. Clearing caches in Develop mode will not remove any personal information other than that stored in temporary files (your history, bookmarks, Downloads folder, and so on are unaffected). How to Clear Mac System Caches To clear system caches specific to your user account.

Launch Finder then click Go Go to Folder in the menu bar at the top of the screen. In the box that appears type /Library/Caches and hit OK. Choose the files and folders you want to delete, and drag them into the Trash. Regain free space by right-clicking on the Trash in your dock and choosing Empty Trash. If you want to delete caches associated with another user account, you’ll need to head to that specific user’s cache directory.

You can do this by changing the folder location in the second step to /Users/ username/Library/Caches—replacing username with the user account in question. To clear system caches that are shared between user accounts, head to /System/Library/Caches instead. Apps Can Do All of This for You You could spend your time manually deleting caches, or you could just get an app to do it for you.

The beauty of these apps is that they generally do a lot more, and they’re especially good at freeing up space you didn’t know you had. Is one such free tool that provides simple one-click deletion of caches. Download the version specific to your operating system, and launch the app. Let it analyze your startup disk, then head to the Cleaning tab. Flick through the tabs and indicate what should be deleted, then click Delete Caches. Is another tool that will kill your caches, though it doesn’t offer as much control as OnyX. Download and install the app, then click Analyze to let CCleaner find as much potential free space as possible (caches included).

You can then hit Run Cleaner to tidy up the selected items. Finally, is a $40/year premium one-click cleaner. The only reason I routinely use it is because it’s included in the. It’ll blitz your caches, and find other redundant macOS data, outdated backups, and huge files you’d forgotten about in a few clicks. I’ve never had any trouble clearing caches using any of these apps, but it’s still worth running regular backups for peace of mind. Reminder: You Don’t Normally Need to Do This Unless you’re incredibly tight on space or looking to target a specific application by deleting its cache, you should probably leave your Mac’s caches well alone. There are plenty of ways to create free space on macOS without ever touching your caches.

You can, Wondering where all of your Mac's storage has gone? These free apps will let you know., or even Running out of space on your MacBook? Here are all your options for adding more storage space to your MacBook. To give you more room to breathe.

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If you own a high performance car that can only drive in the slow lane, you might as well have bought a bicycle. The same rings true if your Mac and high speed internet connection is hobbled by poor performance from Safari. Your experience on the information superhighway is dependent on the reliability of your browser of choice.

If you find that Safari crashes or is slow, we’re going to show you how to eliminate these problems and get back in the fast lane. Put the va va voom back in your web browsing today! How to fix Safari crashing and other common browser problems Surfing (the net) is great until you fall. When Safari starts crashing, it’s clear that something is broken.

Let’s do something about those common Safari crashes. Clear browser cache to speed up slow Safari Temporary data or browser cache is designed to make your web experience a faster one but it can, under some circumstances, hamstring your browser speed to a glacial crawl. Browser cache can become corrupted, and apart from privacy issues (more on that later) it can cause Safari to crash altogether. If you get a Safari crash, it’s important to take note of when and how it crashes.

Does Safari crash on launch or does it crash when you visit a specific site? If you have a problem with one particular site, this is easy to fix.

All you need to do is remove the site history of that site from Safari. Go to the Privacy section of Safari’s preferences. Click the Details button that appears under the 'Remove All Website Data' button. Find the site and remove it from the list If you are experiencing problems on a variety of sites, then you should try to clear all Safari browser cache. To manually clear Safari cache files:. Navigate to Preferences in Safari.

Click the Advanced tab. Enable Show Develop menu. Click on Develop in menu bar. Select Empty caches If you have any concerns about doing this safely, use CleanMyMac X - a Mac cleaning utility that will reliably clear your Safari in just three clicks:. Open CleanMyMac. Select System Junk tab.

Click Scan and click Clean Easy peasy lemon squeezy. CleanMyMac X is free to and try before you buy. Disable search suggestions in Safari to improve browsing speed Search suggestions in Safari can be a great help to speed up the process of finding what we want. But a common crash related to this feature was found to be stopping the search and Safari in its tracks. The Safari search bar crash, as it is known, has been addressed for some in updates.

If you still believe the problem is affecting you, simply disabling Search Suggestions should do the trick:. Go to Safari Preferences. Click on the Search tab. Under 'Search Engine Selection,' uncheck the 'Include search engine suggestions' box.

Close Preferences When Safari stops responding - force shutdown and restart When Safari is operating optimally, you’ll hardly ever have to watch Indiana Jones and the Endlessly Rotating Multicolor Wheel of Doom. However, when Safari is not responding, sometimes you just need to let it take a moment. It could be that a web page is loading a heavy script or your Mac’s resources are currently focused on another task.

Resist the urge to Force Quit Safari. Count to 20. If there is still no response, see if you can be patient for just one minute longer How to fix Safari slowness and freezing on your Mac Is Safari still not responding? Patience won’t solve everything. Without regular maintenance, your browsing experience can gradually slow down. Poor maintenance and bad habits can even push your Mac’s resources to the point where slowness becomes a regular part of your browsing experience. If that sounds familiar, it’s time to fix Safari.

Extremely slow internet browsing? Stop to keep multiple tabs open One of the easiest fixes is to close Safari tabs that you don’t need to use. That’s just common sense, right? It is, but we all know at least one person who seems to be on a mission to set a world record for having the most tabs and windows open. The trick is not to be that person. Each window and tab compete for resources on your system, so closing what you don’t need is the easiest way to improve Safari performance. But what if you want to read a site or page later, but you don’t want to bookmark the site?

No problem – just add it to your reading list. This will store content that you would want to read offline later. In Safari and other apps, click the Share menu and choose Add to Reading List. You can also right-click on a link and choose Add Link to Reading List, or hover over the address bar and click the plus '+' icon.

To access your reading list:. Navigate to Safari’s sidebar, then click the 'reading glasses' icon. Disable DNS Prefetching The point of all of this is to make sure that Safari’s performance isn’t bogged down by having too many open tabs. If you are someone who efficiently manages their tabs yet Safari still crashes, lags or freezes, you should disable DNS prefetching.

DNS Prefetching is a feature designed to make surfing the web faster by scanning over embedded web page links and querying your DNS server to resolve each link to its actual IP address. Ironically, a feature that is designed to make your browsing experience faster can actually weigh down performance. If Safari lands on a web page with hundreds, and sometimes thousands of links to resolve, the process could freeze Safari. If you suspect this could be the issue, disable DNS prefetching using this method:. Open Terminal.

Enter the command defaults write com.apple.safariWebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled –boolean false. Press enter If you revisit the site that had been giving Safari problems and the performance is improved, then the solution worked. However, if there is no noticeable performance boost, it would be a good idea to enable DNS Prefetching and rather troubleshoot other areas. To re-enable DNS Prefetching:. Open Terminal. Type defaults write com.apple.safariWebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled. Press enter, quit Terminal and restart Safari How to protect your privacy in Safari browser Data collection on the internet is a scary thing.

We’re going to show you how to use Safari privately and securely. From clearing of browser history to the removal of cache and cookies and a whole lot more, follow these easy methods. Remove cookies and autofill forms Cookies by themselves are not actively intrusive on your privacy; however, they store data in ways that can be used for user profiling and website tracking among other things. While cookies make the browsing experience faster, and the web experience more dynamic, some users may have privacy concerns. Similarly, autofill forms can be quite scary.

When you’re typing in a field or form on your browser and Safari reveals suggestions that you really wish it didn’t know, it’s time to clear away the autofill data. To manually remove cookies in Safari browser:. Navigate to Safari Preferences Privacy Manage Website Data. Now you can remove cookies for specific sites or simply Remove All To manually clean up autofill entries in Safari browser:.

Navigate to Safari Preferences Autofill. Deselect each option and restart your browser To clean away all of your Safari tracks, from cookies to browsing history and even autofill, you can turn to. Once launched, simply click on the Privacy tab and select Safari. Now you can easily choose what browsing data to delete from your system, all from one convenient window. Keeping your privacy intact is as easy as that. Private Browsing in Safari If you’d like to stay off the grid, Jason Bourne, Safari’s Private Browsing option is what you should be using. When you use a Private Browsing window:.

Each tab in the window is isolated, so websites you view in one tab can’t track what you do in other tabs. Safari doesn’t remember the web pages you visit or your AutoFill information.

Your recent searches aren’t included in the results list when you use the Smart Search field. Safari doesn’t remember changes to your cookies or other website data.

Plug-ins that support Private Browsing stop storing cookies and other tracking information. To use Private Browsing with Safari simply choose File New Private Window. To make Safari open private browsing by default go to Safari Preferences, click General, click the 'Safari opens with' pop-up menu, then choose 'A new private window.' Bored of Bing? Change your Safari's default search engine Did you know there are other search engines besides Bing and Google? With Safari you have four choices for your default search engine - Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. If you’re interested in privacy, we recommend using DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t track or store your personal information.

Whether you want greater search privacy or just to try something new, change your default search engine by following these easy steps:. Go to Safari Preferences Search. Select your search engine of choice Cleanup extensions and plugins Browser add-ons don’t always add up to good experiences. We’ll show you how to shed them to speed up Safari and eliminate a common cause of Safari issues.

Remove Safari Extensions (Add-Ons) and Plugins If Safari is still giving you 99 problems (but efficiency ain’t one), misbehaving extensions (also called add-ons) and plugins can cause Safari to be slow, or crash altogether. Safari extensions are developed to enhance your browsing experience, but they can sometimes have the opposite effect. In a worst case scenario, they can even contain nasty malware.

To get a sense of the problem, trying launching Safari in safe mode (launch while holding shift). This will load Safari without any extensions and plugins. Does your experience improve?

Then you’ve probably get a troublesome extension. To remove Safari extensions manually:.

Choose Safari Preferences in the top menu. Open Extensions tab. Remove the extensions you don’t want Note - The best practice is to turn them all off and then turn each one on, one at a time, to see if you can identify the culprit. For a clearer view and more control over your Safari extensions, install and launch CleanMyMac X and follow these steps:.

Click on the Extensions tab. Click on the Internet Plugins tab or the Safari Extensions tab. Easily remove them for good Disable or uninstall Flash or other browser plugin Flash is a browser plugin, but because it is often the cause of problems, we decided that it deserves its own section. Flash is pretty but high maintenance and it chows your browser and system resources.

That’s why Flash is almost consigned to the dustbin of tech. Is Safari not responding? Did Safari crash? Flash is the first suspect that you should remove. To remove Flash manually:. Download the uninstaller from Adobe.

Choose your OS. Launch the uninstaller from your Downloads folder on your Mac. When the uninstaller runs, click Uninstall. Enter your admin password and close your browser Other safari problems - try to use custom Safari preferences Hopefully Safari is now working as it should.

But you don’t have to stop there. With some hints and tips you can get even more out of your browser by using Safari preferences to customize the experience. How to see/hide the entire URL in Safari’s address bar By default, Safari doesn’t reveal full URLs. If you want to see it all, it’s easy to setup Safari to do just that:.

Go to Safari Preferences Advanced. Toggle 'Show full website address' What to do when Safari push notifications aren’t working When you get a notification of something you wanted to know, it feels great. When you get a notification that you didn’t want to know, it feels annoying. To mute some of the more annoying sites simply turn them off in Safari Preferences Notifications. A Safari to remember With these fixes to common Safari problems on Mac, your Safari experience should be drastically improved. When Safari is performing at its best, it makes for a great browser experience. We hope you feel empowered enough to know that next time Safari has an issue, you can solve it yourself.

Enter The Room From Safari For Mac Windows 10

Or use a helpful app like CleanMyMac to save the day. If all else fails, you could always just use to reset Safari and start from scratch. Not so much 'saving the day' as 'starting a new day.' These might also interest you:.