Your mom may have told you that “a tidy house makes for a tidy mind,” and we tend to believe the same goes for the tech products we use every day.
Take the humble iPhone, for example. iPhone users have long debated whether you should close apps running in the background to improve performance and extend battery life, and while Apple’s official take on this is that there’s no need to close apps unless they’re completely unresponsive, we can confidently say that the story is a bit different when it comes to open browser tabs.
We’re all guilty of running an excessive number of tabs in the Safari app, and Apple’s internal browser has been known to not only become slow, but also unexpectedly delete Safari tabs (opens in new tab) if too many are left open at the same time.
To help you avoid the headache of a slow Safari browser, the good folks are here years old today (opens in new tab) thought it appropriate to highlight a two-second iPhone trick that allows you to mass delete Safari tabs.
How old were you when you heard that you can hold down the tab browser on your iPhone to save you three minutes of swiping? pic.twitter.com/bXgf9mpcsfMay 11, 2023
If you navigate to the bottom right corner of Safari, you will see the open tabs icon. Once you click on it, all your open tabs will show up as normal, but keep pressed that icon will bring up a menu with an option to delete all open tabs at once. See the images below for the two-step process:
Suffice to say, this is a neat trick that saves you the need to manually wipe Every. Single. Open. tab. one by one — and followers of the fact-finding Twitter account were quick to express their gratitude.
“OMG. This has changed my life. Thank you,” an user (opens in new tab) wrote in response, while another said, “I just closed 238 tabs in one second. Thanks for saving my time.”
one more thing…
But wait! There’s another even more helpful trick buried deep in your iPhone’s settings that will make it so you never have to manually delete another open Safari tab.
Apple actually introduced the option to automatically close open Safari tabs after a chosen amount of time back in 2019 with iOS 13. How, you ask? Allow us to explain.
First, navigate to Settings and select the Safari options page. Scroll down there and select the “Close Tabs” menu. By default, the option is set to manual – meaning your ready iPhone will make you manually delete open Safari tabs – but by selecting this menu you can choose to have open tabs automatically closed after one day , one week or one month. Hurray!
But what if you need to restore a tab that closed automatically? Do not be afraid. To revisit a closed Safari tab, long-press the Plus icon in the lower-left corner of the tab preview screen to display a list of recently closed tabs.
And voila! You’ll be on your way to a cleaner digital existence in no time. Read our guides on how to clean a phone charging port and close iPhone apps to learn more about keeping your tech clutter-free.